‘Un spanglish medio raro’: profiling bilingual practices and code-switching as identity markers and their linguistic and sociocultural ideological implications within a students’ community

Abstract

Code-Switching is a bilingual practice that has received little attention in relation to learner’s bilingual identities, as most efforts have gone to immigrant communities (Casielles-Suárez, 2017; Dara Hill, 2009; De Finna, 2007) or bilingual societies (Al-Emran & Al-Qyasi, 2017; Kossoff, 2014; Yat Mei Lee & Wang, 2015). In Chile in particular, research on Code-Switching has only covered a small portion of its use (Cancino & Díaz, 2020; Huilcán, 2019). Understanding bilingualism as a way of expressing identity, the purpose of this research is to characterize the use of Spanish-English Code-Switching in the community of students of English-focused and non-English-focused programs at the University of Chile, and thus, this research will enrich data on learner’s bilingual identity. This is a qualitative, descriptive, and cross-sectional research that gathered data from three focus groups conducted with participants of both groups of students. The collected data was analyzed and contrasted in order to gain further insight into how Code-Switching and other bilingual practices and ideas about them are present in the group. The results showed that there was a community of shared practices, rules, ideologies, and values that was constructed through bilingualism in the group of students of English. Through this community, a romantic ideology was present in relation to a bilingual view of bilingualism, and an instrumental ideology in relation to the hegemony of English. Students of other programs shared the same ideologies but through a more monolingual approach.