Forms of Code-Switching between Bosnian or Croatian and German in 2nd...

The bilingual speech of migrants from Ex-Yugoslavia with German as a contact language has so far hardly been studied from the point of view of linguistics. Therefore we do not know to what extent and under which conditions bilingual heritage speakers of Croatian resp. Bosnian use one language (German) or the other (Bosnian resp. Croatian) or both.

 In my contribution I present the language use of two groups of young second generation heritage speakers with Bosnian origin. The material is based on group discussions between friends and relatives which have been recorded under participant observation by a student for her master's thesis (Mikić 2017). For these speakers code-switching is the unmarked choice. However, their speech is characterized by long stretches of monolingual German speech, few monolingual Croatian or Bosnian passages and stretches of mixed speech, where the two languages in question are either alternated or inserted into each other. I want to show the different types of language interaction occurring in this material, including cases of convergence.

Mikić, Gizela 2017. Das Code-Switching bosnisch/kroatischer MigrantInnen zweiter Generation in Österreich: Eine empirische Untersuchung bilingualen Sprachverhaltens, Masterarbeit Univ. Klagenfurt.