This sociolinguistic study looks at language use at Catholic Masses and in informal social interactions by worshippers in the Ghanaian capital, Accra. The focus is on English employed monolingually as well as alternated or mixed with local languages. Data for the study were collected through the participant observation method. Findings revealed that, although it is mainly a second language in Ghana, English dominates Catholic Masses in urban centers like Accra, and is used extensively and in different combinations with indigenous languages. Even though all the major indigenous languages spoken in Accra, including Twi, Ga, and Ewe, were found to be in use especially in the middle and lower-class churches, English seems to dominate Catholic Masses including such parts as the introduction, homilies, prayers of the faithful, and announcements. In the multilingual urban environment of Accra and the socioreligious context of Catholic services, different types of linguistic hybridity seem to compete with monolingual English as both priests and worshippers make use of their linguistic resources according to the communicative demands of the occasion.

This article examines the phenomenon of code switching in The Map of Love (1999) by the Egyptian—British writer Ahdaf Soueif. Though she chooses English as a medium for her creative expression, Soueif deploys Arabic in her narrative to represent different aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of Egyptian society. The article's methodology is informed by Kachru's framework on contact literature and his categorization of the occurrence of literary code switching or bilingual creativity into different strategies that encompass cultural and linguistic processes. The results indicate the predominance in The Map of Love of the discourse strategies of employing lexical borrowing, culture-bound references and translational transfer. Finally, the article analyzes the functional motivation of code switching in the postcolonial context of the novel and how the use of certain creative strategies might enhance or diminish the narrative's effectiveness and readability.

Based on interviews conducted in ten Catholic churches of the Ghanaian capital, Accra, the paper offers a profile of English use in Ghana and reports on the attitudes of Ghanaians toward English as the official language of their country. The results reveal the influential role English plays in the different settings of Ghanaian communication as well as the high esteem afforded to the English language by the majority of Ghanaian respondents. Most of them cited the numerous benefits that English, as a language of wider communication, brings to the individual speaker and the country.

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