Abstract
The heritage language of a minority community often plays a great part in holding the community together and reinforcing ethnic identity. Its use in formal community settings and intergenerational conversations is often regarded as polite (Ogoshi 1982, 1983, 2005; Li 1994). Code-switching itself has been said to have discourse functions when used as a contextualization cue in conversation (Gumperz 1982). This paper examines the language use of bilingual Pakistani pupils in a Tokyo suburb using linguistic ethnography. Although the pupils are able to speak standard Japanese and do so most of the time, they occasionally use different languages or varieties, such as Urdu, English, and the second-language variety of Japanese that the community adults use. Rather than simply adjusting to the linguistic skills of the adults in Japanese, the bilinguals' codeswitches across languages and varieties were found to be resources in intergenerational communication including discourse strategies, and found to add covert and polysemous meaning to construct and reaffirm generational difference within interactions.
