Word- and Morpheme-Level Code-Switching in Crow

The Crow or Apsaalooke language, a member of the Siouan family, is spoken on and near the Crow Reservation in Southeastern Montana. Crow still exhibits considerable vitality, with three to four thousand speakers, virtually all of whom are bilingual—to various degrees—in Crow and English. There are many more Crows in their teens, twenties and thirties who understand Crow, and are able to speak it to a limited extent. And there are still a few children who are learning Crow as their first language. The high degree of bilingualism among Crow speakers leads to a considerable amount of code-switching. According to my analysis there are two quite different varieties of code switching. The first variety entails switching back and forth between Crow and English on the sentence, clause and phrase level. This type of code-switching occurs most commonly among speakers who are less fluent in Crow, or are more accustomed to using English in everyday conversation, often because they are married to a non-Crow-speaking spouse or are living offreservation. I am not going to say anything more about this variety. The second variety, which will be the focus of this paper, occurs on the word and morpheme level, and is employed by fluent Crow speakers.