LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 18:1 January 2018
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
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         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
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         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
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         Dr. S. Chelliah, Ph.D.
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Patterns of Code-mixing in the Speech of Yemeni Arabic-English Speaking Children:
A Pilot Study

Afrah Humran and Prof. K. C. Shyamala

Abstract

This study examined the intra-sentential patterns of code mixing in the speech of Yemeni Arabic-English speaking children in the light of Scotton (1993) and Muysken (2000). Data was drawn from the speech of four typically developing Yemeni Arabic-English bilingual children. Their ages were between six and nine years at the time of recording the data. The participants were divided into two groups: Group 1 (whose age was above 8 years) and Group 2 (whose age was below 8 years) so as to compare and contrast the results. The speech of the participants was recorded for 8 hours; 4 hours in English and 4 hours in Arabic. The participants’ proficiency in English and Arabic languages was also assessed. In terms of patterns of code-mixing, this paper dived into the minute details of the grammatical categories such as tense and mood of verbs, and produced fine-grained analysis of code mixed grammatical categories of both Arabic and English. We obtained such fine-grained analysis by means of special computer programs which we developed for this purpose. Results showed varied patterns of code mixing in Arabic and English. It was revealed that Group 1 produced more code mixing in Arabic and English languages, viz. 85.71% Arabic code mixing in English and 84.16% English code mixing in Arabic. On the other hand, Group 2 of participants produced less code mixing in Arabic and English languages, viz., 25.85% English code mixing in Arabic and 14.29% Arabic code mixing in English. Top reasons for such variation include dominance, period of exposure to English, lexical gaps and speaker accommodation. Qualitatively speaking, older children mixed more closed content words rather than the open words. The findings of this paper presented a challenge to the findings of Scotton (2002) and Gamal (2007) who maintained that nouns are the most frequent mixed grammatical categories.

Keywords: patterns of code-mixing, bilingual children, language proficiency test, Arabic-English mixing, Yemeni Arabic

Introduction

This study attempts to investigate Code-mixing (CM) in the speech of typically developing children whose mother tongue is Arabic and who use English as a second language. It is well known that English and Arabic are genetically unrelated in any aspect. Due to the fact that English language is well-described by researchers in sources which are easily accessed, we restrict ourselves to describe Arabic language.

Arabic is the language spoken nowadays by around 400 million native speakers in the Middle East, i.e. the Arab Peninsula in Asia and the Northern regions of Africa to the south of the Mediterranean Sea. Arabic is a member of the Semitic language family, which itself is part of the wider Afro-asiatic phylum including Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Cushitic, Berber and Chadic.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Corresponding Author
AFRAH HUMRAN
Ph.D. Research Scholar
Department of Linguistics
Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies
University of Mysore
Manasagangotri
Mysore – 570006
Karnataka
India
afrah.humran@gmail.com
ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5328-0286

Co-author
PROF. K. C. SHYAMALA
Professor and Head
Department of Speech Pathology
All India Institute of Speech and Hearing
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare
Manasagangotri
Mysore – 570006
Karnataka
India
shyamalakc@yahoo.com

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