Leppänen and Nikula (2007, 2008) have examined contact situations between English and Finnish in different social domains, looking at the ways in which English is used alongside and among Finnish as well as the distribution of Finnish and English in such situations. According to Leppänen and Nikula (2008:22-24), the situations form a continuum in which three broad types can be recognized: a) situations that are totally or mainly monolingual in English, (b) situations that are predominantly in Finnish but with some English elements, and (c) bilingual situations in which participants make constant use of resources from both English and Finnish. Leppänen and Nikula state that in the type a) there are two main situations where the language used is totally or mainly English. In the first one, English is the only common language between the parties, for example between people with Finnish as their mother tongue and people with English as their mother tongue; therefore no code-switching to Finnish occurs as Finnish is not the parties’ common language. The other situation occurs between Finnish people among whom English has been chosen to be the language of communication, such as in Finnish CLIL (the content and language integrated learning) schools, where pupils learn content through an additional language (foreign or second), the idea being that students thus learn both the subject and the language at the same time. Furthermore, according to the study, in type b) situations the language used usually consists of single English words or phrases mixed with Finnish, either in their original form or with some morphologically or phonetically adapted to Finnish. The switches from Finnish to English may also sometimes be longer than single words.
Finally, the type c) - bilingual situation in which participants frequently make
use of resources from both English and Finnish - entails more switching between Finnish and English as in type b) situations (Leppänen and Nikula 2008:22-24). The participants could be called bi- or multilinguals due to their employment of resources from more than one language in such way in these situations (e.g. Muysken 1995:7). Leppänen and Nikula (2008:24) add that in such contact situations the length of the switches from Finnish to English can vary from short to longer stretches according to the situation and the purpose of the switch (code-switching can for example mark a change in the subject).
Leppänen and Nikula (2008:22) remind that the borderlines between such situations are hazy due to the context dependent nature of language and emphasize the fact that there is not only one way to use English in Finland.
Instead, different situations and contexts create different conditions for the use of English and Finnish. Although Leppänen and Nikula (2008) mainly discuss the issue from the point of view of discourse studies on which the present study is not based, the contact situations in the questionnaire examples in the present study could be categorized on the basis of the three situation types. The foreign items in the 12 text passages range from single words to longer stretches of text, as in the following passages taken from the questionnaire (the examples, i.e. the words and clauses to which the respondents are asked to react are in bold, the English translation is in italics):
Sitäpaitsi tossa Indian Fallssin huudeilla on vielä 300 asukkaan Crescent Mills.
And besides nearby Indian Falls there is Crescent Mills with 300 residents.
Minun mielestäni vaihtari on lähdössä väärällä asenteella, jos sillä on väliä minne joutuu! North Dakota Rulez! Täällä ei ole mitään, mutta ei se mitään!
It's all about new experiences!
I think an exchange student has got a wrong attitude towards going on an exchange, if it matters to him/her where he/she will end up in! North Dakota Rulez! There is nothing in here, but it is okay! It’s all about new experiences!
Among the “foreign” elements in the text passages (at this point these elements can be called “English” or “foreign” for the sake of brevity) are words that are morphologically adapted to Finnish; for example, they entail Finnish case suffixes. Furthermore, some of the foreign elements are longer switches than this, as in the illustration above. However, defining whether the situations could be categorized as the type c) found by Leppänen and Nikula is more difficult, since the text passages are quite short. Therefore, they do not reveal much of the overall contact situation or the possible functions of the switches, making it hard to decipher whether the writers make frequent use of resources from both English and Finnish, employing linguistic resources from more than one language in a way that is common for bi- or multilinguals. To sum up, it could be said that if these contact situations were to be placed in the continuum, they would probably stand somewhere between the situation b) and c) described by Leppänen and Nikula (2008:22-24), as they comprise both single words adapted to Finnish and longer stretches of switches of English that would indicate a language use somewhat similar to the language use of bi- and multilinguals. After all, as Leppänen and Nikula (2008:22) remind, the boundaries between the three situation types are vague and therefore a continuum well illustrates the matter. The orthographic, morphological and syntactic adaptations and non-adaptations of the example elements in the questionnaire will be discussed in chapter 4.3.3.
As said, much of the questionnaire I used is based on the study by Leppänen et al. (2011), as it also examined, among other issues, the uses of Finnish-English code-switching. This is also the focus of the present study, although the scope of the present study is much narrower. On the other hand, some research questions presented here are completely different form the ones posed by Leppänen et al. (2011). Furthermore, the small scope of the present study enabled me to focus on a specific age group and to compare the results from two schools in order to have a more detailed look at young language users’
insights to language mixing. The adaptations made into the questions from the questionnaire by Leppänen et al (2011) will be elaborated on in chapter 4.3.1.
The results of the survey will be reflected to the results of the present study throughout the paper, which will hopefully give a more extensive and multifold picture of the subject.
3 BILINGUAL LANGUAGE PRACTICES: BILINGUALISM AND CODE-SWITCHING
The present study, with its focus on code-switching, is theoretically closely linked to bilingualism (or multilingualism) studies, as code-switching studies originally stem from the field of bilingualism. Thus, in order to describe and use the concepts essential for the present study, I will first take a general look at bilingualism in chapter 3.1 before moving on to the focus of the study, code-switching, and its terminological jungle in chapter 3.2. It will become evident that this is no problem-free task and instead of finding a consensus on definitions, there will be many suggestions out of which I will have to make the best of. I will focus on the main topic of the study, code-switching, and thus examine bilingualism only briefly.