Linguistic Aspects of Arabic-English Code Switching on Facebook and Radio in Australia

Abstract

Code switching (CS) is a worldwide phenomenon wherein bilinguals utilize two languages within a single conversation and even within a single utterance in both formal and informal settings. The study investigates the linguistic aspects of CS among Arabic-English bilingual speakers in Australia. An integrated approach with both qualitative (conversation analysis) and quantitative (frequency distribution) analysis methods is employed for the purpose of this research. The data were collected from two sets of public resources that are recordings of free-flowing conversations in radio and chats on Facebook. The study concluded that CS is possible at various syntactic and discourse boundaries in these contexts despite the typological differences between the two languages. Nouns with noun phrases and interjections represented the largest number of switched elements in the corpus. In examining the theoretical aspects of Arabic-English CS, the data gave support to the congruence model while challenged the universality of the equivalence and the free morpheme models.