The Social Aspects of Code-Switching in Online Interaction: The Case of Saudi Bilinguals

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the concept of code-switching (CS) between English and Arabic and the CS practices of Saudi online users via a Translanguaging (TL) lens for more inclusive view towards the nature of the data from the study. It employs Digitally Mediated Communication (DMC), specifically the WhatsApp and Twitter platforms to understand how the users employ online resources to communicate with others on a daily basis. This project looks beyond language and considers the multimodal affordances (visual and audio means) that interlocutors utilise in their online communicative practices to shape their online social existence.This exploratory study is based on a data-driven interpretivist epistemology as it aims to understand how meaning (reality) is created by individuals within different contexts. This project used a mixed-method approach, combining a qualitative and a quantitative approach.In the former, data were collected from online chats and interview responses, while in the latter a questionnaire was employed to understand the frequency and relations between the participants' linguistic, non-linguistic practices and their social behaviours. The participants were eight bilingual Saudi nationals (three men and five women, aged between 20 and 50 years old) who interacted with others online.The study data were gathered from 194 WhatsApp chats and 122 Tweets which were analysed and interpreted according to three levels: conversational turn-taking and CS; the linguistic description of the data; and CS and persona. This project contributes to the emerging field of analysing online Arabic data systematically, the field of multimodality and bilingual sociolinguistics. In addition, it bridges some of the existing gaps in the DMC literature. The findings of this study are that CS by its nature, and most of the findings, if not all, support Wei's (2018) notion of TL that multiliteracy is one's ability to decode multimodal communication, and that this multimodality contributes to the meaning.