Take it ya 3AZIZI: Code-switching on facebook by Jordanian bilinguals

Abstract

This study scrutinizes the structural aspects of Jordanian Romanized Arabic-English code-switching (CS) on Facebook. All posts examined are written in Romanized Arabic, a new trend of writing on computer-mediated communication (CMC). Three types of CS are examined, i.e., inter-sentential, intra-sentential, and tags, though the greatest focus is on the intra-sentential instances because of their syntactic complexity. Different syntactic categories are examined and critically scrutinized. Finally, the validity of two controversial syntactic constraints, i.e., the Equivalence Constraint (EC) and the Free Morpheme Constraint (FMC) by Poplack (1980) are tested. The findings show that nouns and noun phrases are the most frequently used type of switches among the other syntactic categories, i.e., verbs and verb phrases, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and prepositional phrases, and pronouns. The results also obviously reveal that there is a violation to the two constraints, namely The Free Morpheme Constraint and The Equivalence Constraint.