PERCEPTIONS OF HAUSA-ENGLISH BILINGUALS ON CODE-SWITCHING ACT IN UUM

Abstract

The act of code-switching from one language to another appears to be a normal and pervasive phenomenon as speakers who are competent in two or more languages often switch between the linguistic varieties in a single sentence or speech to express their intent and share interactive values. Sometimes, the bilinguals may not possibly be aware that they repeatedly switch between the available codes in their utterances. Therefore, the paper discusses the perceptions of code-switching during the social contact of Hausa bilingual speakers studying at Universiti Utara Malaysia. Information for the analysis was part of the data collected using sets of questionnaires distributed to 80 bilinguals in the main study to investigate the functions and factors motivating Hausa-English code-switching. The report in this paper, however, only focuses on one of the three research questions, which aims at analysing the consciousness, frequency, and comfortableness of the bilinguals when they code-switch. The result of the investigation established that a majority of the bilingual speakers perform code-switching subconsciously, but they do it frequently and they feel comfortable about it when they interact with friends who share the same first language with them. On the specific question of whether they feel comfortable code-switching with friends of different gender, only slightly more than half (54%) of the participants gave a positive response. Accordingly, the bilinguals perceived the act of alternating between the two languages as a normal trait and a discourse strategy used to communicate effectively, which is mostly influenced by certain social variables such as participant, context, topic, status and solidarity, and linguistic features, i.e., the syntactic structure and grammatical constraints, of the two languages.