The study of spoken discourse in a mixture of languages, commonly called 'conversational codeswitching', has a history of several decades, and a number of well-developed theories compete to account for it. A number of researchers have studied multilingual written discourse from different perspectives, but most of these studies have focussed on interactive genres that resemble conversation. Only a few studies have offered analyses of multilingual texts with prominent visual aspects, such as advertisements, posters and web pages. This article briefly reviews research on written codeswitching and then goes on to introduce examples of multilingual and multimodal texts that, although they involve combinations of languages within a text, do not correspond to what is normally regarded as code-switching. It argues that an insightful account of these phenomena requires an understanding of the kinds of multilingual literacy practices with which they are associated. Furthermore, for an insightful account of them to be given, they need to be analysed as multimodal texts, where visual and spatial aspects of the whole are crucial to interpretation. The article presents a framework for analysing multimodal, multilingual texts in terms of their visual and spatial as well as linguistic characteristics, and examples of how this can be applied to actual data.

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Hypotheses about the syntax of codeswitching thus far have for the most part not taken into account such factors as the nature of bilingualism in the community where the switching takes place, the relative status of the languages, the nature of bilingualism in the community and other aspects of the social context. This paper argues that an adequate theory of codeswitching syntax is one where such factors are held to be relevant, so that the actual nature of the switching is relative not only to the language pairs, but also to other situational factors. Previous researchers have used notions of “congruent” or “equivalent” categories, implicitly or explicitly, tending to treat these as universal categories of phrase structure and looking for “constraints” which limit the possible outcome of the interaction of two linguistic systems. This paper argues that “congruence” of categories is construed or “created” by bilinguals in a given situation, with four alternative outcomes for a given candidate switch: harmonization, neutralization, compromise, and blocking. Rather than seeing codeswitching utterances as the product of “constraints,” it develops a view where codeswitching is the result of languages aligning their structures over time to achieve congruence.

Spelling matters to people. In America and Britain every day, members of the public write to the media on spelling issues, and take part in spelling contests. In Germany, a reform of the spelling system has provoked a constitutional crisis; in Galicia, a 'war of orthographies' parallels an intense public debate on national identity; on walls, bridges and trains globally, PUNX and ANARKISTS proclaim their identities orthographically. The way we spell often represents an attempt to associate with, or dissociate from, other languages. In Spelling and Society, Mark Sebba explores why matters of orthography are of real concern to so many groups, as a reflection of culture, history and social practices, and as a powerful symbol of national or local identity. This 2007 book will be welcomed by students and researchers in English language, orthography and sociolinguistics, and by anyone interested in the importance of spelling in contemporary society.

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