The question of what is the difference between borrowing and code-switching has attracted the attention of scholars far and wide and gave at the same time rise to a plethora of publications in order to draw a boundary between these two terms. In the most recent of these publications (Grosjean 1982, Poplack & Meechan 1995 & 1998; to name but a few), it has been often argued that borrowings are donor-language items that are integrated in the grammar of the recipient language at a community level, while code-switches take place at individual level and they retain the grammar of the language from which they derive. However, the current political and economic uncertainties in various regions of the world have been found to cause mass refugee movements to conflict-free places, where contact between newcomers and locals usually lead to some kind of linguistic interinfluencing. The current study discusses the contactinduced German-origin lone lexical items used by Iraqi-Arabic-speaking refugees in Germany. It is the aim of this study to show whether or not these lexical items can be considered as code-switches or established borrowings. The data I am analyzing come from spontaneous and elicited conversations of the first and second wave of Iraqi- Arabic-speaking refugees and asylum seekers to Germany as well as from online- and paper-pencil-questionnaires.

The article investigates the phenomenon of code-switching among bilingual speakers – Polish students studying English Philology who switch to English by inserting English words, phrases and even whole sentences while speaking their mother tongue Polish. The study is based on the questionnaire and aims at determining the various reasons and functions of code-switching (CS), the attitudes and the factors which either facilitate or impede its occurrence. The study demonstrates that code-switching constitutes an indispensable part in the respondents’ daily interactions although their attitudes, functions and factors which determine the incidence of code-switching are miscellaneous and vary considerably.

The article presents the results of a sociolinguistic study of surzhyk in the speech of residents of the North‑Eastern region of Ukraine. The focus is on the main trends of communicative possibilities of surzhyk and its functional features in the situation of a multi‑code. It was found that the conscious use of surzhyk speech is a characteristic primarily of young speakers, who are able to realise its irregularity and use for a certain purpose, although in a limited range of situations. In situations of family communication, they use surzhyk as their ‘home language’. Such behaviour can also be a sign of a certain communicative ‘game’ when the speaker uses any language ‘image’ adapted to the specific needs of language communication. A diachronic analysis of the functional capabilities of surzhyk made it possible to reveal, on the one hand, its gradual ‘ageing’ as a functional first language, and on the other hand, its ‘getting younger’ as a conventional stylistic marker. Besides, its increased frequency in extra‑family communication has been recorded, which may indicate a gradual transition of the Russian‑speaking residents of Sumy to Ukrainian‑speaking forms of behaviour.