The pragmatics of codeswitching on Ghanaian talk radio

Abstract

Radio, in particular, the popular Asante Twi talk-radio format that emerged in the mid-1990s, provides a unique forum for analyzing the linguistic tensions of contemporary Ghana. Radio is a context where talk and debate are central; since language is foregrounded, anxieties and beliefs about what the use of a particular language indexes socially are thrown into stark relief. This paper draws on conversation analysis, information structure, and ethnography to make sense of the prevalence of intrasentential codeswitching into English in the context of predominantly Twi talk-radio debates. It proposes that switches into English mark new or salient information, and as such function as a pragmatic tool in radio discourse, allowing speakers to negotiate the conversational floor and metapragmatically frame the speech event. It is argued that English’s pragmatic force in this context is drawn from its ability to index a multivalent prestige born of contradictory sites of authority within contemporary Ghanaian life.