37.2870, Reviews: Current Insights into Code-switching: Draško Kašćelan, María del Carmen Parafita Couto, Peredur Webb-Davies, Rocío Pérez-Tattam, Hans Stadthagen-González (eds.) (2026)

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Subject: 37.2870, Reviews: Current Insights into Code-switching: Draško Kašćelan, María del Carmen Parafita Couto, Peredur Webb-Davies, Rocío Pérez-Tattam, Hans Stadthagen-González (eds.) (2026)

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Date: 09-Sep-2026
From: Sara Acero Diez [saraacerodiez at gmail.com]
Subject: Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Draško Kašćelan, María del Carmen Parafita Couto, Peredur Webb-Davies, Rocío Pérez-Tattam, Hans Stadthagen-González (eds.) (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-1267

Title: Current Insights into Code-switching
Series Title: Current Issues in Bilingualism
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/522

Editor(s): Draško Kašćelan, María del Carmen Parafita Couto, Peredur
Webb-Davies, Rocío Pérez-Tattam, Hans Stadthagen-González

Reviewer: Sara Acero Diez

SUMMARY
“Current insights into code-switching” edited by Draško Kašćelan,
María del Carmen Parafita Couto, Peredur Webb-Davies, Rocío
Pérez-Tattam and Hans Stadthagen-González and published by Language
Science Press brings together eight chapters that approach
code-switching (CS) from four interdependent axes, understanding this
crucial phenomenon in the way that bilinguals and multilinguals speak
as a grammatical variation (chapters 2, 4, 5); as an agent in
development and caregiving contexts (chapters 6 and 7); as a
communicative and social resource (overlaps in chapter 7 and mainly
represented by chapter 3); and in relation to neurodiversity and
clinical or developmental conditions (chapter 8).
The volume is also noteworthy due to the variety of evidence it brings
together. Alongside focused empirical studies, it includes review
chapters, particularly on code-switching in diverse neurodevelopmental
conditions, as well as a longitudinal case study of caregiver and
child interactions. Subsequently, the book provides a picture of some
of the directions of code-switching research and where relevant gaps
remain, especially linked to processing, methodological consensus and
divergence, developmental trajectories and underrepresented
populations.
This scope is supported by a team of collaborators whose breadth of
perspective givse the collection robustness, even as the individual
chapters differ. In what follows, I consider each of them in turn and
assess their contribution to the whole.
In chapter 1, a brief introduction of the aims and content,
Webb-Davies, Parafita Couto, and Kašćelan develop the ethos of the
volume, framing it also within Margaret Deuchar’s intellectual legacy.
Code-switching is considered thus “a window into the complexities of
bilingualism and multilingualism and one that continues to reveal new
insights” (Webb-Davies, Parafita Couto, & Kašćelan, 2026: 13). This
idea, just as much as the work of Deuchar, permeates the ensemble.
Chapter 2 materializes the perspective outlined in the introduction.
Goria and Bellamy’s (2026) qualitative and quantitative analysis of
code-mixing in Heritage Piedmontese (HP) constitutes the first
corpus-based account of code-switching practices in HP and shows what
kind of relationship exists between heritage language contact,
community practices and morphosyntactic integration. The authors focus
primarily on Spanish noun insertion, examining a sample of five hours
of speech from 22 speakers among a larger corpus of interviews and
conversations around preserving HP and its culture. Considering a
taxonomy of alternations (see also Myers-Scotton, 1993; 2002; and
Muysken, 2000), maximal insertions, and minimal insertions, they
tested what kind of mixing occurred more frequently.
Their main finding is that insertional patterns predominate (and
overwhelmingly so) over alternations: of 318 Spanish nouns identified,
only 16 are alternations, while the great majority are either maximal
or minimal insertions, these last ones occurring more. Goria and
Bellamy (2026) relate this pattern firstly to the interactional
conditions of the data collected, their context characterized by
“intended monolingualism”, that is, ‘piemonteis american’ (as used in
the study and by participants in it) is maintained as the base and
matrix language and larger shifts or mixes towards Spanish are
discouraged. The chapter’s value lies in its attention to a fragile
sociolinguistic ecology, despite recent efforts in protecting and
preserving this heritage variety both in the Argentinian community
that it pertains and the Italian one. Notwithstanding, the authors
call for cautiousness when it comes to interpreting the
well-documented descriptive findings.
Chapter 3 stays within the grammatical axis of the discussion, but
moves the focus towards a bigger picture, aiming to describe how a
younger generation of “digital natives and multilingual chatters”, in
this case Estonian teenagers aged from 10 to 18 years old, frame their
conversations. Vihman, Korkus, Pilvik and Praakli (2026) examine the
corpus “Teen Speak in Estonia 2020-2021” and focus on the
instant-messaging part, that in turn contains about 60,000 words from
102 informants, 99 of them using at least some English. Even though
the chapter reports that on average 7.5% of the words are in this
language and its presence varies considerably depending on speakers
and conversations, its use is not marginal, but rather a defining
feature of this kind of juvenile digital environment. The authors
explore both orthographical and morphological integrations of English
into Estonian and question whether the findings seem consistent with
previous literature for Spanish and English.
The contrast between these two approaches to linguistic adaptation
drawn in this section proves illuminating, as it highlights that they
do not follow the same logic: whilst orthographical integration seems
more optional, stylistic or even playful at times, morphological
integration turns out to be much more systematic, particularly in
instances where Estonian grammar requires case markings (nouns and
verbs) in contrast to adjectives, that remain unintegrated for the
most part.
Far from presenting digital communication as a chaotic space, the
study argues that in this “third register code-switching follows
identifiable patterns, coherent with previous literature milestones
regarding different contexts of linguistic contact” (et al, 2026).
Therefore, Vihman, Korkus, Pilvik and Praakli ‘s work represents an
opening to a new and relevant field, that of online communication and
language mixing, while remaining in tune with the volume’s theoretical
guiding principles and Deuchar’s (2020) theoretical framework.
Under the volume’s theoretical section linked to understanding CS as a
grammatical variation, chapter 4 considers the literature on mixed
determiner phrases (DP) and gender assigning strategies combining
languages with and without gender distinctions.
Ezeizabarrena, Munarriz-Ibarrola and Arrazola (2026) apply it to
Basque-Spanish utterances, testing whether acceptability is driven by
2 main types of cues: phonological or analogical, as well as
considering the bilingual background of the participants. For that,
they gathered 22 bilinguals, half of them Spanish dominant; the other
half Basque dominant, both groups with high proficiency in the
complementary language. Participants were asked to complete a
judgement task in which they rated 40 sentences containing mixed DPs.
Among these sentences, there were opposing pair instances, namely
“double matching”, i.e., gender in Spanish matches the ending of the
Basque noun; “double mismatching”, in which none of the cues support
the article used. Results show that even though participants generally
accepted DP’s, “double-matched” cues were rated higher. When only one
of the cues matched, ratings were intermediate, reaching their lowest
point when neither cue matched. Moreover, Spanish-dominant speakers,
who overall favored analogical matching, reacted strongly to these
utterances, while Basque-dominant participants tended to rate more
laxly, more uniformly leaning towards phonological ruling. This
chapter emphasizes the fact that even in mixed bilingual speech,
speakers are still following language patterns and constraints, rather
than mixing languages in a completely random way. Whether participants
realized these tendencies or not remains to be explored in further
studies.
Chapter 5 ties organically to the previous one in the sense that both
resort to judgment tasks (acceptability the former; grammaticality the
latter) to research the grammatical dimension of CS, based as well on
the Matrix Language Framework (Myers-Scotton, 1993). Nonetheless,
Valdés Kroff, Treadway, Tamargo and Dussias (2026) shift the attention
towards late bilinguals, which is refreshing since in so far that
their research introduces a bilingual profile relatively less favored
in part of the bilingual CS discussion. They depart from the
well-documented production asymmetries within the verb phrase in
Spanish English codeswitching, by which speakers who frequently CS in
their communities tend to favor “progressive switches at the
participle (e.g., está cooking) as compared to perfect switches at the
participle (e.g., ha cooked)”.
Their goal is to determine whether late bilinguals are sensitive to
these asymmetries (and others found in Spanish English bilingual
communities). To do so, Valdés Kroff, Treadway, Tamargo and Dussias
combine an experimental approach based on eye-tracking during a
reading task that also comprises comprehension of what was read and a
grammaticality judgment part. The latter has allowed researchers to
link participant’s metalinguistic responses to their real-time
processing.
The most significant outcome reveals that sensitivity does not emerge
uniformly across all experimental contexts: it is only when
participants read with the aim of comprehension, and not when they are
performing the aforementioned judgement task, that they reproduce the
asymmetrical tendencies observed in everyday bilingual speech. While
emphasizing the influence exerted by the norms in a certain bilingual
community, Valdés Kroff, Treadway, Tamargo and Dussias point towards
the relevance of considering additional means of testing said sway and
move towards how these kinds of patterns manifest in processing.
After the detailed approach of chapter 5, chapter 6 opens the extent
towards a comprehensive literature review. Vihman and Vihman (2026)
step away momentarily from the empiric to thoroughly revise 47 studies
covering 21 languages, 30 languages pairs and 197 children up to age
4, focusing on spontaneous production in bilingual children during the
first years of acquisition. This change in scale, from immediate
responses in late bilinguals to early stages of bilingual development,
places interaction between languages, and thus code-switching within
an extended evolutionary context.
The authors have a clear purpose: identify which aspects of early
grammar and/or linguistic structures are most likely to be involved in
cross-linguistic interaction, point out what kind of interactions is
accounted for and what role do relative accessibility and
compatibility when it comes to structures, as well as determine
whether dominance or greater proficiency has any sway. Overall, the
authors stress that interaction between a child’s two languages is
ultimately common and normal in this context. Moreover, the chapter
argues that this relation cannot be ascribed to a unique or specific
grammar point, but rather that the areas affected vary and span
multiple grammatical domains, such as determiners, copulas, subjects
and objects, verb endings, wh-questions and word- order.
At the same time and relevantly so, these researchers believe that the
somewhat old claim that bilingual children are confused is not true.
They provide a more nuanced point: for the bilingual child navigating
these two repertoires at an early age, the two languages are usually
distinguishable, but they have channels, bridges, that connect and
influence each other during development.
Chapter 7 explores a similar point of view, but from a longitudinal
angle. Thanks to the generosity of a grandmother and her grandchild,
Quay (2026) is able to observe their code-switching dynamics in a
quite unique playfield that ties back to developmental bilingualism.
The study documents how a grandmother, one of the main caregivers to
the child and worried about her grandchild’s isolation from classroom
activities due to a lower command of English, changed the family’s
linguistic policies, introduced systematic code-switching into English
in around 90% of their interactions, without leaving behind their
heritage language (Cantonese Chinese) and using it to translate or
negotiate meaning.
Far from it being confusing or detrimental to the child’s linguistic
progression, this bilingual input helped the child in reproducing
English lexicon, as well as fostering his adaptability. He adjusted to
this new communicative reality by making use of congruent
lexicalization and convergence and so, he drew on the syntax of his
dominant language to construct mixed utterances and make up for his
shortcomings in English. The child’s response revealed great
linguistic agency. In addition, it redirected one of the central
questions in code-switching research from grammatical restrictions
towards a more ecological point of view regarding the purpose or
utility of this common practice among multilingual speakers. This
study is particularly insightful because of its functional approach.
Rather than assessing mixed utterances according to monolingual adult
standards, it demonstrates empirically how children take advantage of
their entire repertoire to maintain social interactions and move
forward with their learning journey.
To end the volume, chapter 8 shares with chapter 7 the understanding
that code-switching can operate as an essential resource to circumvent
difficulties when it comes to linguistic development. Draško Kašćelan
y María del Carmen Parafita Couto (2026) close the volume with a
systematic revision that examines what we really know about CS inside
the neurodivergent community.
They trace five clear aims, such as identifying neurodevelopmental
conditions in which language mixing has been investigated, pointing
out approaches used to explore CS in this population [1], precisely
describing the demographic and bilingualism-related characteristic of
said community, outlining any comparisons in these kinds of linguistic
practices between neurodivergent and neurotypical bilinguals and
particularly what kind of attitudes exists among the investigated
group. Linked to this last research question, it is noteworthy that
the authors decide to include the professional dimension through a
specific setting: when caregivers/parents seek advice related to the
potential benefits or detriments of CS, what kind of attitudes or
responses do they encounter? Is CS seen as an asset or remains neutral
in the land of language acquisition within the neurodivergent
community?
To accomplish these tasks, Kašćelan and Parafita Couto opt for a
scoping review (used traditionally to estimate what exists in terms of
literature rather than what is effective) and analyze 31 studies,
focused in overwhelming majority on autism and Developmental Language
Disorder (DLD). One useful detail, particularly for researchers
looking to familiarize themselves with methodology overall, is that
the studies taken into consideration vary a lot in how they
investigate CS. Across these 31, 20 of them use quantitative methods,
10 qualitative and only one uses mixed methodology. In terms of
approach, we find diversity as well because some target spontaneous
speech, other semi-experimental tasks, others go all the way in
(experimental tasks) and some combinations of all of them.
A major point that the chapter makes is that evidence is narrow. Not
only is there some bias in targeted neurodivergence manifestations,
but also the demographic picture is uneven, to say the least. Most
participants are from North America or Western Europe, and most
studies have English as one of the pairs in combination. The authors
signal these biases and argue that this is a serious issue because
many multilingual contexts where code-switching is normal (and
accepted) are barely represented at all. Finally, there is also a
strong age bias. 74% of the studies were conducted with children aged
12 or younger. Teenagers and adults were thus underrepresented.
Nevertheless, authors maintain that empiric evidence does not support
the idea that code-mixing (used interchangeably in the same vein as
‘multilingualism’ is with ‘bilingualism’ both throughout the volume
and this review) could be detrimental to the population considered.
Furthermore, half of the comparative works reviewed don’t identify
significant differences with neurotypical populations. One of the
assets of this thorough revision resides in rigorous methodological
scrutiny. Kašćelan and Parafita Couto hint that many of the
“discrepancies” come from decontextualized and purely experimental
tasks (such as acceptability judgements or image naming) that don’t
reflect real communicative use. Additionally, in response to attitudes
towards CS and professional recommendations, the authors identify that
the usual advice given (mistakenly) to families is that they avoid
language mixing. Therefore, any “anomalies” in frequency of switches
or type of CS could be derived from changing family language policies.
Taken as a whole, this collection of articles achieves something that
is by no means obvious: it demonstrates that code-switching is not a
subject that has been exhausted by former debate. This linguistic
pattern is still capable of raising pressing questions about social
interaction, cognitive processing, representation related to
scientific advancements and neurodiversity.
[1] Although it could be debated whether neurodivergence can be
generalized under homogenous parameters.
EVALUATION
The volume’s thematic and methodological range is, as seen throughout
the chapters, one of its biggest strengths, but also the source of a
possible criticism. As the reader progresses from oral corpora to
eye-tracking studies or literature reviews, it starts to become
somewhat apparent that the various rigorous contributions do not
always measure the same phenomena, although they share similar
terminology. Similarly, the volume tends to favor grammatical
approaches (in three of the seven study chapters), although we cannot
clearly state a division between general topics, as developmental
aspects permeate social ones and so on.
Heterogeneity is one of this collection’s main selling point and while
it provides a comprehensive perspective on CS from a wide spectrum of
approaches (oral and written corpora, digital communication
longitudinal studies, judgement tasks, eye-tracking and in-depth
literature reviews), it can become an obstacle for a non-specialized
reader whi is looking to have a general sense of where this widespread
linguistic phenomenon is at in 2026.
Given its theoretical depth and kaleidoscopic methodology, the volume
appears to be aimed primarily at researchers and postgraduate students
(even though not as an introduction to CS) in linguistics,
bilingualism, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. That said,
chapters 7 and 8, on development and neurodiversity expand its
potential appeal to professionals in the field of education and
language intervention.
Linked with its wide scope, the volume remains closely tied to the
anglophone world and the global North (Argentina being the only
exception), missing thus other community practices in which
code-mixing tradition could bring forth fresh perspectives.
Lastly, an editorial conclusion. The book compiles dense literature
and leaves a lot to the discernment of the reader. Except for the
first chapter, there is no major guidance to signal commonalities from
one chapter to another and thus, we arrive at the end with no
encompassing conclusion to tie all the (loose) ends neatly back.
Despite this, the volume presents with accuracy the current tension
between willingness or impulse directed towards studying
code-switching in real, organic use and laboratory constrictions.
The frictions here mentioned do not undermine the relevance of
“Current insights into code-switching”. On the contrary, they turn it
into a valuable source since it documents rigorously how
code-switching is interpreted and studied nowadays, as well as
exposing with honesty the disciplinary challenge of studying it in
ecological conditions, without distorting it.
REFERENCES
Deuchar, M. (2020). Code-switching in linguistics: A position paper.
Languages, 5(2), 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5020022
Koreinik, K., Mandel, A., Praakli, K., Vihman, V.-A., Kängsepp, A.,
Lindström, L., Aigro, M., & Pilvik, M.-L. (2023). Estonian Teen
Language Corpus v.1.0 [Dataset]. University of Tartu.
https://doi.org/10.23673/re-455
Myers-Scotton, C. (1993). Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in
codeswitching. Clarendon Press.
Myers-Scotton, C. (2002). Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters
and grammatical outcomes. Oxford University Press.
Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing.
Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sara Acero Diez is a PhD candidate in French Linguistics at the
University of Oviedo (Spain) where she writes a thesis on the
code-switching practices of French Spanish advanced bilingual speakers
and teaches French as a foreign language to undergraduate students.
Sara’s research interests combine sociolinguistics, multilingualism
and emotions.



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