The syntactic form and social functions of Saudi Arabic-English code-switching among bilingual Saudis in the United States

This study investigates the syntactic constraints and social functions of Arabic-English code-switching among Saudi bilinguals living in the United States. The participants were Saudi adults and children who had lived three to seven years in the United States.;The researcher, an acquaintance of the participants, played the role of "observer-as-participant" in collecting the data in an informal, natural setting.;The study focuses on three aspects of code-switching interaction, and provides the following findings, which lead to recommendations for Saudi educators: (1) Formal constraints on code-switching: None of the currently proposed linguistic constraints on code-switching was able to account for patterns observed in the data without violation. (2) Social functions of code-switching: Whereas code-switching to English was found to be associated with several practical domains such as academic terms and precise numbers, Arabic took precedence in areas such as religious terms, and for certain discourse markers such as 'yaani,' or 'I mean.' (3) The influence of age on language preference: A comparison of bilingual children and adults in the study showed that the dominant language for the children was English, whereas for adults it was Arabic; consequently the role of children's code-switching differed from that of adults. While adults switched to English for objectivization and intellectual terms, children switched into Arabic for Saudi cultural and religious terms. (4) Adults and children violated the linguistic constraints on code-switching differently; while adults did not code-switch between free and bound morphemes except in cases concerning the definite article, children switched to insert bound morphemes, such as adding the English suffix -ing to an Arabic verb.;Since Saudi bilingual children's dominant language is English, I recommend that educators in Saudi Arabia provide returning bilingual children with a special program that helps them gradually adjust to the Saudi teaching style, to their monolingual peers, and to their non-dominant Arabic language.