“His Favorite Things Mahi Al-hadia” Social Functions of Code Switching in Bilingual Children’s Conversations

Abstract

This study explored the occurrence of code switching among six Arabic-English Saudi bilingual children living in the United States at the time of the study. A Qualitative research design, using three research instruments namely, parental questionnaire, language portraits, and recorded storytelling sessions, was conducted in order to investigate the social functions of code switching. The study adopted Myers-Scotton’s (1993) Markedness Model to examine better the social motivation behind code switching in children’s conversations. Overall, the findings revealed the participant’s dominant and preferred language to be English, and the switch to English was frequent to serve certain functions, such as to change the addressee, engage in interaction, make alignment, ask for translation, expand, invoke authority, and finish the conversation. Moreover, this study contributes to the current research on the Markedness Model among bilingual children by providing evidence for Myers-Scotton (1993) as marked and unmarked code switching was observed among the Arabic-English bilingual children. This study also agrees with previous studies (e.g., Bolonyai, 2005; Fuller, Elsman, & Self, 2007; Myers-Scotton, 2002) that argued that bilingual children are rational and social actors who choose a given code intentionally to achieve certain social goals in a given interaction.