The paper deals with intergenerational variation in syntactic and functional CS patterns in different contact situations: post-colonial settings, migrant communities and particularly standard language/dialect bilingualism in Italy. It is shown that the occurrence of a particular switching strategy may be often be traced to the influence of factors outside the domain of syntax, as it largely depends on socio- and psycholinguistic factors interacting with age. This calls into question the assumption that there is one CS pattern per language pair and also what this assumption implies, i.e. that extralinguistic factors play only a minor auxiliary role in code switching with respect to the dominant primary role of internal linguistic properties.