A sociolinguistic study of the use of code mixing in social media by Egyptian bilingual users

Abstract EN

The present paper aims to investigate how Egyptian bilingual social media users resort to code-mixing in their daily use of social media.

The aim is to uncover the reasons behind code- mixing practices among this class of educated Egyptians in a monolingual country.

In doing so, the paper attempts to demonstrate the nature of their linguistic endeavors and the role of code- mixing in identifying social media texts.

Data for the present paper was collected from a sample of social media texts after permission to participants' accounts was requested.

The study followed a qualitative research approach where the data was analyzed to identify the common factors of code- mixing, and find out the reasons why some bilinguals engage in the phenomenon and practice it in their social media texts.

The theoretical framework within which this study is conducted corresponds to Muysken (2000); his classification of code-mixing phenomena at the sentence level (i.

e.

insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization) is followed here.

The results revealed that most of the bilingual educated Egyptians who resort to code mixing view it as a facilitating and a time-saving strategy especially when expressing complex feelings, emotions and opinions.

The paper claims, contrary to previous research, that the occurrence of a word or a structure from one language into the context of another language has to be referred to as code-mixing rather than code switching.

I claim here that code switching is one of the processes of code mixing which is similar to alternation and it has to be embedded under the general frame of code mixing.

The study proposes two types of code mixed texts that are referred to as Multiple Code-Mixed Texts (MCMTs) and Transliterated Code-Mixed Texts (TCMTs).

The results also indicated that a high percentage of the participants, though extensively involved in code-mixing, view it as a negative influence on their learning of English as a second language.