An investigation of Swedish beauty vloggers’ use of code-switching between Swedish and English

Abstract: Much research has been done in the area of code-switching; that is, changing from one language to another in the middle of the same utterance, especially in bilingual communities. Yet, there seems to be little research done on code-switching between English and Swedish among Swedish young adults. In this study, the speech of four different young beauty vloggers will be investigated with regard to their use of code-switching between English and Swedish. All four have Swedish as their first language. The results show that the amount and the types of code-switching differ between the four vloggers in the study.  The results also show that code-switching occurs relatively frequently, and that it is especially common to use English words and expressions with Swedish morphology. This is also supported by previous studies. Furthermore, two areas were found to be especially prone to code-switching: commerce (i.e. the make-up industry with imported brands and names), and youth culture; i.e. the vloggers seem to want to code-switch to be trendy and to communicate something about their identity.