English in spoken Swedish - a corpus study of two discourse domains

This corpus study explores the use of English in the spoken Swedish of two discourse domains, namely, the conversation of business meetings in an international shipping company, and the casual conversation of young adults.

The analysis of the conversations indicates that the two groups of speakers differ in most respects. They diverge in terms of frequency of code-switches, type of code- switches, incorporation strategies, language alternation cues (flagging devices) and in their use of established loan words and English words not recorded in Svenska Akademiens ordlista ('non-standardised items'). The extent of integration of the English words in the discourse also differs between the two domains. The business people code-switch on average once every 14 seconds. Their code-switches are predominantly in the form of single non-standardised English words which are inserted into clauses that comply with the morphosyntactic framework of the matrix language (Swedish), and they very rarely flag their code-switches. The young adults, on the other hand, code-switch once every 58 seconds. They also favour single-word code-switches, hut these are primarily established loan words. The young adults are furthermore the main producers of multi-word code-switches, most of which are in the form of embedded language islands representing alternational code-switching. Although these are characteristically made up of basic lexical items, the young adults very often flag English expressions which are not established and integrated in Swedish.