The Use Of Code Switching Between Arabic And English Languages Among Bilingual Jordanian Speakers In Malaysia

Code switching phenomena was investigated in different contexts where English is spoken as a first language (i.e. inner circle), English is spoken as second language (i.e. outer circle), and where English is spoken as a foreign language (i.e. expanding circle). However, very few studies addressed...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Alaa Qasim Mohammad Al-Hourani
Format: Thesis
Language:en_US
Subjects:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Code switching phenomena was investigated in different contexts where English is spoken as a first language (i.e. inner circle), English is spoken as second language (i.e. outer circle), and where English is spoken as a foreign language (i.e. expanding circle). However, very few studies addressed the issue of code switching among Jordanian speakers in outer circle countries such as Malaysia. Therefore, this study was conducted to fill the gap in the literature. This research investigates the bilingual Jordanian speakers’ use of code switching in their daily oral interactions (i.e. formal and informal communicative events from a sociolinguistic perspective). This research identified the contexts in which Arabic-English code switching occurs, including the communicative events in which Arabic-English code switching occurs, described and investigated the functions of Arabic-English code switching among the bilingual Jordanian speakers in Selangor, Malaysia from a sociolinguistic perspective, investigated the code switching patterns and investigated whether the communicative events and the patterns of code switching influence each other. Following a qualitative research design, data were collected ethnographically from five Jordanian speakers by employing two tools of enquiry namely observation and semi-structured interview. Findings revealed that Jordanian speakers code switch in both formal and informal communicative events. Furthermore, Jordanian speakers code switch from English to Arabic and vice versa for several sociolinguistic functions i.e. to bridge the lexical gap, to quote someone's speech, to further explain a point, to exclude someone out of the conversation, and to demonstrate capability. In addition, findings revealed that there are two patterns of code switching that Jordanian speakers employed in their daily oral interactions namely intra-sentential and inter-sentential switching. However, intra-sentential code switching is used more frequently than inter-sentential code switching. Finally, the findings of this research revealed that the communicative events and the patterns of code switching do not influence each other.