Language Choice and attitudes in Public Institutions: The case of the University of Maroua (Published)
This study sets out to investigate on language choice and attitudes in public institutions. The study intends to scrutinize the factors that account for the language choice made by some language users at the University of Maroua, i.e., to choose any other languages different from the two official languages. To do this, a random sampling of 250 participants was used. The instrument used is a questionnaire with a purely sociolinguistic undertone. Spolsky’s (2009) Language Management and Fishman’s (1972) Domain Analysis backed up the study as frames. At the end of the analyses, it has been shown that, students, the teaching staff (involving some university Administrators) and the support staff have some positive and negative attitudes following the language choices made in relation with where the communication takes place as well as the language situations such as enabling mutual intelligibility, social inclusion/exclusion, intimacy and showing identity, solidarity and work coordination.
Keywords: Language Choice, Multilingualism, University of Maroua., official public setting
Code-Switching With Arabic: A Case of the Hindi/Urdu Mother Tongue Speakers of the Expatriate Community Working In Saudi Arabia (Published)
In a multilingual setting, speakers of more than one language use alternately the linguistic items of languages available to them while interacting with each other. A situation of language amalgam provides a conducive atmosphere for language alternation. Cod-switching is a dominant and striking feature of a language contact situation. Code alternation, a cover term for the phenomena of code-switching and code-mixing occurs in a language contact situation whereby more than one language play a significant role in the speech of an individual or their group. The present paper takes into account as how the expatiate employees from the Indian subcontinent working in Saudi Arabia sharing Hindi/Urdu as their tongue switch over to Arabic and incorporate linguistic items from Arabic into their native language. The paper begins with a brief introduction about the phenomenon of code-switching and code-mixing. It also presents some definitions of the terms code-switching and code-mixing and throws light on social motivation and functions of code-switching. The paper reviews a considerable portion of literature on linguistic alternation in terms of ‘code-switching and code-mixing’. An overview of the research methodology adopted in carrying out the study along with the results of the investigation are also documented. In the present paper an effort has made to prepare, present and analyze an exhaustive list of Arabic linguistic items and expressions used in the process of exchange and alternation by Hindi/Urdu mother tongue speakers working in Saudi Arabia.
Keywords: Code Switching, Code-Alternation, Code-Mixing, Embedded Language, Language Contact, Matrix Language, Multilingualism