Technology has transformed how we communicate. Research from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts shows that code-switching — the practice of switching between languages, dialects, accents, tones, or cultures in conversation — is changing with it.

Faculty members in the School of Modern Languages and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs have published three studies examining how language and cultural code-switching have adapted to the digital age, revealing speakers’ fluency, promoting self-expression, and making messaging more effective. Their research is relevant, as the population of bilingual and bicultural people increases in the United States.

By better understanding code-switching in digital spaces, “we can reveal insights into language dynamics and cultural identity among young bilingual speakers,” says Hongchen Wu, an assistant professor in the School of Modern Languages. “Annotated code-switching datasets are also a valuable resource for training and testing language technologies tailored to bilingual speakers — allowing, for example, an AI-assistant that can understand their code-switching with no struggles.”

Read the full article published by Georgia Tech's School of Modern Languages and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs >>