Codeswitching on the Web: English and Jamaican Creole in e-mail communication(147 Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Based on a corpus of private email from Jamaican university students, this study explores the discourse functions of Jamaican Creole in computer-mediated communication. From this participant-centered perspective, it contributes to the longstanding theoretical debates in creole studies about the creole continuum. The book will likewise be useful to students of computer-mediated communication, the use and development of non-standardized languages, language ecology, and codeswitching. The central methodological issue in this study is codeswitching in written language, a neglected area of study at the moment since most literature in codeswitching research is based on spoken data. The three analytical chapters present the data in a critical discussion of established and more recent theoretical approaches to codeswitching. Fields that will benefit from this book include interactional sociolinguistics, creole studies, English as a world language, computer-mediated discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Abbreviations; 3. 1. Introduction; 4. 2. The creole continuum and CMC; 5. 3. How the situation determines code choice - a "simple, almost one-to-one relationship"; 6. 4. Giving contextualization cues: How writers provide context information through code choice; 7. 5. Codeswitching and identity: How writers describe themselves through code choice; 8. 6. Summary of the analysis and discussion; 9. 7. Conclusions; 10. References; 11. Appendix; 12. Notes; 13. Index

Review :
The book is well laid out and reader-friendly, with engaging and even entertaining data. The introductory overview of theoretical debates in the Jamaican and creole studies literature is extremely helpful and makes the study accessible to scholars who are otherwise unfamiliar with the Jamaican case. Hinrichs has created some unusual and innovative corpora. [...] this study sets a landmark in the study of the multilingual internet and will be a indispensable point of reference for researchers engaging with CMC against the background of sociolinguistics and discourse studies. [...] the volume under review is an outstanding dissertation and highly recommendable reading for anyone interested in any of the fields of study involved. [...] this book is likely to appeal to researchers, teachers and students across a range of disciplines: New World Englishes, Creole, discourse and identity and CS. An important contribution of the book is the provision of the whole corpus and its main strenght lies in its ability to apply an impressive range of theoretical approaches to the analysis of the data and to demonstrate new ways in which speakers are ensuring language vitality of a 'minority' oral language, through the adaptations to new media and written code. The research reported in the volume is extremely innovative and represents a theoretical and methodological contribution to several areas of current interest: computer-mediated communication (especially in the context of a country where computers are less accessible), the use and development of vernacular language varieties in writing, the study of codeswitching, in particular written codeswitching. This book is of interest to researchers in all of these areas, and coherently brings the topics together with excellent and insightful discussions of the literature. In addition it makes a valuable theoretical contribution to the area of creole studies and the longstanding theoretical debates about the ‘creole continuum’.