Insights into codeswitching from online communication: Effects of language preference and conditions arising from vocabulary richness

Abstract Twitter data from a crisis that impacted many English–Spanish bilinguals show that the direction of codeswitches is associated with the statistically documented tendency of single speakers to prefer one language over another in their tweets, as gleaned from their tweeting history. Further, lexical diversity, a measure of vocabulary richness derived from information-theoretic measures of uncertainty in communication, is greater in proximity to a codeswitch than in productions remote from a switch. The prospects of a role for lexical diversity in characterizing the conditions for a language switch suggest that communicative precision may induce conditions that attenuate constraints against language mixing.