Code switching in Sia Pedee story-telling

This article deals with code switching in a corpus of narratives collected in Sia Pedee (Chocoan) among the Épera of the northern Pacific coast of Ecuador. The reinsertion of Sia Pedee in the nowadays dominant Spanish-speaking ethnic community has resulted in older speakers making use of code switching as a way to flag their ethnic identity and index their attitudes towards propositional content. While code switching seems to be inducing certain incipient changes in Sia Pedee, the seriously endangered state of the native language would prevent those changes from taking definite shape. Similarly, the diglossic condition of Sia Pedee before Spanish is preventing the crystallization of a systematic pattern of language mixing.