Codeswitching is a process that usually happens with speakers who master more than one language. These speakers are capable of using one or another language during their conversations depending on the topic or interlocutor that they have their conversation with. Weinreich defines a bilingual person a following way: “who switches from one language to the other according to appropriate changes in speech situations” (Weinreich 73). There are many different social factors that may provoke a speaker to apply codeswitching to the conversation, it usually happens when the speaker wants to relate to the social class, age, gender or ethnicity of the interlocutor. There is also a possibility that code switching occurs during a specific time of the conversation. Speakers may also switch within a specific syntactic category (Poplack 554). Also, speakers may change language while communicating in order minimize or maximize social distance between them.
Our research was focusing on the group of female students whose age ranged from 20-23 year olds. They were representatives of different majors. Our group was mostly asking questions regarding their leisure time. Therefore, it required some personal involvement into providing answers to the questions. Since we were using the social app “Whatsapp”, we were able to make recordings from our conversations. After retrieving the recordings, we were able to use ELAN in order to transcribe the dialogues that we had with our participants.
While carefully looking through the responses that we got from our participants, we have realized that more people than we expected used code switching. One of the places when it happened was when our participants started talking about something very emotional and exciting in their replies. One may assume that they were very overwhelmed with the memories and could not find phrases in Arabic right away in order to express all the feelings. Also, one of the reasons why participants might have code switched because of the social constraints, they began to feel more comfortable with an interviewer, especially when they were supposed to think about a great trip that happened recently.
There are some limitations to our research since we have a small sample size. Also, all of our participants were female which might have influenced their choice of language. We were not unable to access different age groups, so it is hard to say whether this behavior is typical for young adults or for all the age groups in overall. Also, since the conversation was held through Whatsapp it was hard for the participants to use codeswitching in order for them to understand that the listener would be able to comprehend the conversation.
In conclusion, it is important to state that code switching occurs whenever specific social constraints are meant to be passed. Our participants have showed that they tend to use code switching whenever they feel that social distance between them and interviewer are disappearing. Our interviewees were forgetting about the official setting and communicating with unknown people, because they were all deep in their memories about the past events which made them feel positive. The process of code switching happened during specific topics and when the interviewees were providing details about their nice memories. Therefore, in our case it was one of the main reasons for interviewees to use codeswitching from Arabic into English.
Works Cited
Poplack. Shana. Sometimes I'll star a sentence in Spanish u termino en espanol: toward
atypology of code-switching." Linguistics 18, 581-618, 1980. Print
Weinreich, Max. Internal Bilingualism. 1959. Print.
