Orthography switching as code-switching among German-based Russian speakers

The development and popularisation of computer-mediated communication has led to the emergence of new discourse practices exclusively available online, as orthography plays a crucial role in this written medium. A special case thereof occurs in situations of language contact, as online practices may additionally be affected by speakers’ knowledge of two wholly separate writing systems. One such situation of language contact arises from native Russian speakers who are now resident in Germany; these speakers initially use the Cyrillic script but now reside in a country where the Latin script constitutes the norm. On forums used by this community, Russian remains the language of choice and with it, Cyrillic the strongly preferred writing system. However, Latin is also used and accepted in specific contexts: when speakers code-switch by inserting a word from German into an otherwise Russian sentence, they either transcribe the word into Cyrillic or use the original Latin script (e.g. Arbeitsamt/Арбайтсамт ‘job centre’). This study explores these occurrences of switching from one script to another within one turn from a socio-functional perspective. Thirty-five threads from two forums are examined; overall, “orthography switching” is found to parallel oral code-switching, as it serves similar discourse functions. Most commonly, switching to another orthography is used by speakers to highlight the topic of conversation: switching to Latin within the opening post brings attention to the topic that is to be discussed, switching to Latin further in the thread is used to communicate topic change. Reasons for orthography choice mirror reasons for language choice in spoken speech, giving rise to the possibility of treating orthography as a code in its own right. Such an analysis has further impact on our understanding of code as it supports the analysis of ‘code’ as ‘a system associated with socio-indexical values’ rather than ‘a language/variety’ (cf. Alvarez-Caccamo, 1998).