A Sociolinguistic Investigation of SMS Code-Switching Among Students

Abstract

The emergence of new modes of communication such as SMS over the past twenty years resulted in the use of special codes, including code mixing and code switching. This study investigates the use of code-switching in SMSs among EFL students in Mostaganem University. More specifically, it probes into the following: whether the participants mix Algerian Arabic with English in their text messages, the reasons they code switch for if ever they do so, and the patterns of code-switching they apply. To undertake this qualitative study, two research instruments have been used, namely an online questionnaire and a corpus of the participants’ SMSs. The content analysis of the findings demonstrated that code-switching is widely used among EFL students when texting each other, and this is done for various reasons, chiefly lack of words, when there are no equivalent terms, economy (the use of abbreviations and acronyms), expressing emotions, when the receiver speaks English, prestige, humour and the use of technical terms. Data also showed that the examined SMSs are in line with the linguistic features of Netspeak identified in the literature and that four patterns characterise code-switching from Algerian Arabic to English, namely tag-switching, intra-sentential switching, inter-sentential switching, and intra-word switching. This suggests that new technologies as well as studying a foreign language encourage code-switching among students and results in the development of patterns that characterise their SMSs. More research is needed to tell if those patterns and reasons occur when other languages are involved in code switching.