The author explores the implications of the phenomenon known as "codeswitching", where in given situations, different people with access to the same linguistic repertoire (or one person in various situations) will make different linguistic choices.

...a remarkable volume....Carol Myers-Scotton's volume represents an important addition to studies on language variation. The theoretical chapters spell out details regarding markedness theory that one would otherwise need to gather by reading a large number of separate studies. It is also valuable in that it clarifies that markedness is not a phenomenon limited to bilingual research....this volume represents the state of the art of modern language-use analysis.

"...[a] remarkable volume....Carol Myers-Scotton's volume represents an important addition to studies on language variation. The theoretical chapters spell out details regarding markedness theory that one would otherwise need to gather by reading a large number of separate studies. It is also valuable in that it clarifies that markedness is not a phenomenon limited to bilingual research....this volume represents the state of the art of modern language-use analysis."--Anthropological Linguistics "Carol Myers-Scotton's volume represents an important addition to studies on language variation. The theoretical chapters spell out details regarding markedness theory that one would otherwise need to gather by reading a large number of separate studies. It is also valuable in that it clarifies that markedness is not a phenomenon limited to bilingual research...This volume represents the state of the art of modern language-use analysis."--Anthropological Linguistics

Carol Myers-Scotton is the Carolina Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of South Carolina where she teaches courses in sociolinguistics, language contact phenomena, and discourse analysis. She has published widely on codeswitching and is the author of Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa (OUP, 1993) and Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching (OUP, 1993).