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- Title
Language selection and switching among Strasbourg shoppers.
- Authors
Gardner-Chloros, Penelope
- Abstract
This article examines the switching between the French and Alsatian language in Strasbourg, France. Strasbourg possesses three departments stores of distinct social character. Printemps is considered the most modern, expensive and therefore likely to be the most French-speaking. Magmod is more old-fashioned, noticeably dowdier and less luxuriously appointed. Meanwhile, Jung has its own identity, its own politics and its own shopping center. The switching category was more broadly defined in ingroup conversations. Discussions between customers and between salespersons have a less specific purpose and are less brief than those between customers and salespersons. One problem was that many department store transactions are frustratingly silent. The customer browses, chooses, hands the item to the salesperson operating the cash register together with the required sum and walks away with her purchase and her change, not having exchanged a word. There appeared to be no case in which a salesperson failed to reply in Alsatian to a customer who addressed her in Alsatian. There may also have been non-Alsatian customers who spoke only French. Overall, more Alsatian was spoken in necessity than in luxury departments and luxury departments gave rise to a little more switching as well as more French.
- Subjects
STRASBOURG (France); FRANCE; CODE switching (Linguistics); FRENCH language; ALEMANNIC dialects; DEPARTMENT stores
- Publication
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1985, Vol 1985, Issue 54, p117
- ISSN
0165-2516
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/ijsl.1985.54.117