20code-Switching Among Bilingual Saudis On Facebook

CODE-SWITCHING AMONG BILINGUAL SAUDIS ON FACEBOOK
by
Saeeda, H. Alfaifi
B.A., King Khalid University, 2007
A Thesis
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Master of Arts Degree.
Department of Linguistics
in the Graduate School
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
May, 2013
UMI Number: 1541907
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THESIS APPROVAL
CODE-SWITCHING AMONG BILINGUAL SAUDIS ON FACEBOOK
By
Saeeda, H. Alfaifi
A Thesis Submitted in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in the field of Applied Linguistics
Approved by:
Krassimira Charkova, Chair
Karen Baertsch
Laura Halliday
Graduate School
February, 2013
AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF
SAEEDA ALFAIFI, for the Master of Arts degree in Applied Linguistics, presented on
February 6th , 2013, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
TITLECODE-SWITCHING AMONG BILINGUAL SAUDIS ON FACEBOOK
MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Krassimira Charkova
This study investigated the use of intrasentential code-switching on Facebook.
The corpus included 1000 screenshots of Facebook comments collected from 10 Saudi
female Facebook friends who were bilingual in Arabic and English. The data were
examined through statistical and content analysis. The results showed that intrasentential
code-switching occurs frequently in informal Facebook interactions.
Further, the occurrence of code-switching was analyzed in relation to 10 topics of
Facebook interactions, including gossip, humor, technology, compliments and thanking,
achievement, movies and songs, family and intimacy, makeup, travelling, and religion.
Among these 10 topics, gossip and humor elicited significantly higher frequencies of
intrasentential code-switching. Moreover, the qualitative results showed that the most
frequent English words within Arabic sentences were technical and academic terms,
whereas the most frequentArabic words within English sentences were religious words.
Overall, this study shows that the use of intrasentential code-switching among Arabic-
English female friends on the social network Facebook is a natural part of their
interactions and the frequency with which they employ code-switching is related to the
topic of their communication, their language environment, their cultural experiences, and
their religion.
i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, all praise is due to God, Allah the Almighty. You give me the
power to believe in myself and to reach my goals and dreams.
Then, I would like to express my sincere and deep sense of gratitude to my Chair,
Dr. Charkova. I have learned a lot through her guidance and comments. Thanks for your
knowledgeable help and precise guidance although of your hectic schedule. Thank you
for encouraging and inviting me to be a guest speaker in your Research Method class.
Thank you very much for everything.
Also, my thanks go to the members of my thesis committee, Dr. Baertsch and Dr.
Halliday for their guidance and help in this thesis.
There are not enough words to express my thanks to my beloved parents, Hassan
Alfaifi and Ree’ah Alfaifi. There is no way to reward them for being the best parents one
could have. I am speechless to express my sincere thanks for their concern and
enthusiastic support to pursue my graduate study. My dearest parents, I am very proud of
you and I hope I can make you proud of me.
Also, thanks to all my sisters and brothers, I hear your prayers and best wishes, I
love you so much my beloved Family. Special thanks to my brother and my sister-in-law,
Mohammed Alfaifi and Faizah Alfaifi, for accompanying me during my graduate study
in the U.S. Your patience and constant support have never been forgotten.
My appreciation also goes to my friend, Metro Armstrong, for proofreading my
thesis.
ii
Last but not least, special thanks to my Facebook friends for their cooperation
throughout the research. I really enjoyed reading your Facebook posts. Thanks dear
friends!
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................ ii
LIST OF TABLES .........................................................................................................iv
LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................vi
CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 1 – Introduction................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 2 – Literature Review ..................................................................... 6
CHAPTER 3 – Methodology ............................................................................ 18
CHAPTER 4 – Results...................................................................................... 23
CHAPTER 5 – Discussion, Conclusion, Recommendation ............................. 50
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................. 58
VITA ........................................................................................................................... 63
iv
LIST OF TABLES
TABLE PAGE
Table 1 .......................................................................................................................... 25
Table 2 .......................................................................................................................... 26
Table 3 .......................................................................................................................... 48
Table 4 .......................................................................................................................... 48
Table 5 .......................................................................................................................... 49
v
LIST OF FIGURES
FIGURE PAGE
Figure 1 ........................................................................................................................... 5
Figure 2 ......................................................................................................................... 24
Figure 3 ......................................................................................................................... 24
Figure 4 ......................................................................................................................... 27
Figure 5 ......................................................................................................................... 29
Figure 6 ......................................................................................................................... 30
Figure 7 ......................................................................................................................... 32
Figure 8 ......................................................................................................................... 34
Figure 9 ......................................................................................................................... 35
Figure 10 ....................................................................................................................... 36
Figure 11 ....................................................................................................................... 37
Figure 12 ....................................................................................................................... 39
Figure 13 ....................................................................................................................... 40
Figure 14 ....................................................................................................................... 41
Figure 15 ....................................................................................................................... 42
Figure 16 ....................................................................................................................... 42
Figure 17 ....................................................................................................................... 43
Figure 18 ....................................................................................................................... 44
Figure 19 ....................................................................................................................... 45
Figure 20 ....................................................................................................................... 46
Figure 21 ....................................................................................................................... 46
vi
Figure 22 ....................................................................................................................... 46
Figure 23 ....................................................................................................................... 47
vii
1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the Internet has become a medium of communication among different
people in the world. Because of the prevalence of the Internet, many researchers have focused
their attention on the study of language use through the Internet. The term Computer-Mediated
Communication (CMC) is used to describe various types of online communication. One of the
sociolinguistic phenomena typical of bilingual communication that has been observed in CMC is
code-switching (Danet & Herring, 2007).This study aimed to examine the occurrences of code-
switching in Facebook communication among Arabic English bilingual users. Since code-
switching is a core-concept in this thesis, the next section provides some background information
about this sociolinguistic term.
1.1. Code-switching
Woolard (2005) broadly defines code-switching as a linguistic phenomenon in which an
individual alternates between two or more language varieties in the same exchange. In addition,
Gardner-Chloros (2009) defines code-switching as a phenomenon observed in bilingual
interactions, when people who speak the same two languages or dialects shift from one to the
other in the same conversation or sentence. Moreover, bilinguals with different levels of
proficiency produce code-switching for different reasons “filling linguistic gaps, expressing
ethnic identity, and achieving particular discursive aims, among others” (Bullock &Toribio,
2009, p. 2). Besides these reasons, solidarity, accommodation to listeners, anda choice of topic
motivate bilinguals to switch from one variety to another (Wardhaugh, 2010).

2
Furthermore, some researchers such as Poplack (1980), Liu (2008), Muysken (2000) and
Myers-Scotton (1993) examined code-switching in terms of grammatical analysis. There are
three types: intersentential, intrasentential and tag switching. Intersentential code-switching
occurs within sentence boundaries. Example 1 illustrates this type of code-switching.
Example 1: Sometimes I will start a sentence in English y terminó in español – and end in
Spanish.(Poplack, 1980, p. 594).
Intrasentential code-switching occurs in the middle of sentences and often happens within
one sentence or even one phrase. In this type, a speaker switches a code unconsciously, as
illustrated by example 2.
Example 2: “ You have to find a kalopedi (good guy) and marry him. (English-Greek, Liu, 2008,
p. 5).
On the other hand, tag switchingis a subcategory of intrasentential switching that refers to
switching one word or phrase from one language to another as illustrated by example 3.
Example 3: “He asked me for money, Znas, I had to say no, Znas” (Liu, 2008, p. 5).
The tag here is Serbian for “you know”
In reference to intersentential code-switching, Myers-Scotton (1993) observed that the
dominant language in the code-switching is called the matrix language, whereas the inserted
language is called the embedded language. Besides these types, Muysken (2000) indicates that
bilinguals employ three strategies, namely alternation, congruent lexicalization , and insertion of
a word or phrase from one language. Alternation refers to code-switching where the two
languages remain relatively separated, as shown by example 4 (Swahili-English).
Example 4: “That’s too much. Sinapesa”.
“… I don’t have [much] money.” (Myers-Scotton, 1993, p.41)

3
The second strategy is described as “congruent lexicalization in which the two languages
share a common grammatical structure that can be filled with lexical elements from either
language” (Muysken, 2000, p. 135). This type is illustrated by example 5 (Dutch-Sranan).
Example 5: Wan heri geedlte de ondro beheer fu gewapendemachten” (Muysken, 2000, p.
139).
One whole part Cop under control of armed force
“One whole part is under control of the armed forces"
The third strategy involves insertion of a word or phrase from one language into another
language. An example of Persian-Swedishis illustrated by example 6.
Example 6: Xob pas false-an pesa-ä(Liu, 2008, p. 7)
Well then false-COP3PL boy-PL
“ Well then boys are false”
In addition, code-switching is explained in terms of sociolinguistic perspectives. Thus,
Gardner-Chloros (2009) states that code-switching is affected by some social factors such as
speakers’ attitudes, age, gender, and social class. This study employed an exploratory approach in
analyzing the use of intrasentential code-switching among female Arabic-English bilingual
friends on Facebook. It started with a broad agenda which was narrowed down in the process of
data analysis. Although social variables were not directly explored, some references are made in
view of their effect. The next section presents an overview of Facebook as a medium of
communication.
1.2. Facebook as a Medium of Communication
Facebook is a web-based social network that allows people to connect with other people. This
website “combines the best of blogs, online forums and groups, photo sharing…” (Veer, 2011).
4
Furthermore, it is the easiest way in which people can share their interests with friends and
strangers alike. There are two parts of this site where members can show their different social
activities: a profile page (Wall part) and a home page. Facebook members can learn about others’
personal information from their profile page, buy and sell items, and put text and photos in their
profile (called Notes). In addition, Facebook members can use Walls, Notes, or Groups to
exchange ideas, and Messages to send email (Veer, 2011). With respect to these different social
activities, language used by Facebook members varies and has different characteristics in terms
of gender, nationality (Panyametheekul& Herring, 2007) and other variables. This study focuses
only on the phenomenon of code-switching in Facebook interactions among bilingual Saudi
English female friends.
1.3. Features of Internet Arabic language
Internet service was introduced in Saudi Arabia in 1994 and it was first made accessible to
academic, medical, and research institutions. However, from 2000 to 2005, the users of the
Internet reached 2.54 million (“Internet in Saudi Arabia”, 2011). With the prevalence of the
Internet in Saudi Arabia, there are some features characterizing Arabic language used on Internet,
known as the phenomenon of Arabizing and Islamizing the Internet (Duhe`, 2007). Arabizing
refers to the tendency of Arabic speakers to use the Roman alphabet instead of the Arabic in
computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Crystal, 2001). Palfreyman and Al Khalil(2007)
explain the reason for using the Roman alphabet as due to the fact that many computers lack the
Arabic writing system. The following example (See Figure 1) shows the use of the Roman
alphabet instead of the Arabic in instant messaging (IM).

5
Figure 1.Example of ASCII-ized Arabic in Instant Messaging1
The above example comes from Palfreyman’ and Al Khalil’ study (2007) in which they
examined the characteristics of ASCII-ized Arabic among university students in the United Arab
Emirates. ASCII-ized Arabic refers to ASCII (American Standard Code for Information
Interchange) symbols that are used to represent Arabic in CMC. ASCII-ized Arabic is used
commonly among Arab speakers in CMC, particularly when code-switching occurs, i.e. when
Arabs write in English, they use certain numbers to represent some Arabic letters that do not
appear on a keyboard for the Arabic words that they use in an English discourse. For example,
the number 7 looks like the Arabic letter ha’a (See Figure 1) (Duha`, 2007).
Moreover, Arabs use some invented abbreviations such as ASAWRAWB that refer to an
abbreviation of the main greeting among Arab Muslims. Since the use of ASCII-ized Arabic
seems to be closely related to code-switching, this study will also record the instances of ASCII-
ized Arabic among bilingual Saudi English female friends in Facebook.
So far this chapter offered an overview of the theoretical framework of the study. The
next chapter examines the empirical literature related to the research problem at the heart of the
present research.
1
This figure is published with the permission of the authors.
6
CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter provides a review of previous research related to code-switching. The review
has been organized into three categories: 1) Code-switching in online communication; 2) Code-
switching and gender; and 3) Studies about code-switching among Arabic-English bilingual
speakers.
2.1. Code-switching in Online Communication
Besides studies concerned with oral code-switching, a number of studies have examined
written code-switching, particularly in online communication. For example, Montes-Alcala`
(2007), Goldbarg (2009), Lee (2007), Sukyadi, Wirza, and Hasiani (2012), Taştan (2012), and
Axelsson, Abelin, and Schroeder (2003) conducted research related to code-switching in online
communication.
Montes-Alcala` (2007) investigated why and when bilinguals code-switched in blogs. He
hypothesized that participants’ e-mails would contain social functions similar to those found in
oral communication. The data was collected from 15 Spanish-English blogs from 2005 to 2006.
One hundred and fifty pages were analyzed. The researcher excluded blogs that had two separate
pages for English and Spanish posts. The participants were homogeneous in terms of age and
origin. However, there was no consistency in terms of gender as the study included 10 women
and 5 men. Based on the social functions of oral code-switching, the researcher classified these
functions into seven categories: lexical items, triggers, quotes, elaborations, tags, emphases and
free, i.e. the category in which there was no specific reason to switch codes.
7
After that, he analyzed data based on those categories. He concluded that bilingual
bloggers switched most for lexical and emphatic reasons. Another purpose for code-switching
was to show “the degree of familiarity that the individual possessed with both Hispanic and
Anglo worlds” (p. 169).
Another study by Lee (2007) examined the linguistic feature of Martian language (internet slang
that is popular among Taiwanese) and explored how the Taiwanese showed their identities
through using this language on web blogs. She focused on the effect of gender, age and topic on
bloggers’ use of the Martian language on their web blogs.The data was collected from examined
five blogs with different topics. These topics included political affairs, finance, animation, comic,
game, students and entertainment, and pets. Lee (2007) hypothesized that the language used in
politics and finance might be more formal, so Martian language might be less used. However, it
would be used more frequently in animation and students’ blogs. Moreover, the researcher chose
ten articles that were 300 to 500 words in length. Lee gathered the demographic information such
as age and gender from the bloggers’ pages. Therefore, two levels of ages were identified; 15-30
and 31-65.
The researcher used a quantitative method (two-way ANOVA) to analyze the data
according to age and gender. In addition, the researcher used a qualitative method to analyze the
following questions: 1) How often does Martian language take place in blogs of different topics?;
2) What are the most frequent characteristics of Martian language ?; and 3) How does Martian
language function for bloggers to construct different identities and relationships?
The results showed that age had a significant effect on the use of Martian language
because the younger group revealed a higher use than the older group. However, there was no
effect of gender on the use of ML. Moreover, the results revealed that ML was used in an
8
informal context such as student and pet blogs. Lee concluded that ML was used as a tool of
communication and to shorten social distance among participants.
Another study examined Spanish-English communication (Goldbarg, 2009) for bilingual
code-switching among five native speakers of Spanish who also spoke English fluently. The
researcher gave the participants a questionnaire about their daily e-mails. The questionnaire
included six questions. Some questions were about the languages used in e-mails, and others
were about e-mail recipients, and the subjects and functions of their particular language choices.
He asked the participants to check their e-mail accounts daily and respond to the questions for an
entire week. Also, he asked them to provide him with selections of e-mails they wrote. All
participants were graduate students, ranging in age from their late 20s to early 30s. The
participants were three men and two women. The final corpus included 133 emails. After the
participants completed the questionnaire, the researcher interviewed each participant in order to
elicit some information related to their language use in e-mails and to explore their thoughts
towards code-switching in their spoken communication.
Goldbarg (2009) analyzed 101 e-mails in view of code choice in order to address the
following questions:1) What is the dominant language of the emails? 2) Did a clear or equally
efficient Spanish/English equivalent exist for a code-switched word or phrase? The code-
switching functions were classified into technical, stylistic or emphatic words. Besides these
categories, he created other categories called popular words or phrases such as taxes and
research. The last question he asked was whether code-switched words or phrases appeared in
the body of an e-mail. For example, when participants used a Spanish word as a greeting in
English matrix sentences, this Spanish word was coded as a Spanish greeting. According to these
categories, 22 code-switching functions were recognized. Also, he created a similarity matrix of

9
code-switching functions based on a co-occurrence of these functions in each e-mail. Each cell in
the matrix included the number of times that two functions co-occurred. To analyze the matrix,
multidimensional scaling was used. In addition, the researcher created three tree diagrams to
explore the association between participants’ code-switching and different attributes of e-mail.
The emails were grouped into the following categories: original sender (not participants),
language of participants' replies, language used by original sender (participants), relationship to
recipient, and e-mail subject. The language(s) used, were analyzed as follows: English-only;
Spanish-only; both but English-dominant; both but Spanish-dominant; and both about the same
of each. In addition, three tree diagrams were created: 1) Code choice x Language of e-mail
received; 2) Code choice x E-mail subject; and 3) Code choice x Relationship to recipient. These
trees were analyzed by Chi-squared tests.
The findings of the study showed that participants wrote more English e-mails than
Spanish ones because participants were students at an American university. Thus, the most
messages were replies to English e-mails. However, some participants preferred Spanish when it
was more often used in participant-initiated e-mails. Also, Spanish was used as the unmarked
code as English was used to supplement Spanish. Regarding code-switching functions, English
was used often for technical and common terms. Spanish was used in informal communication.
For example, participants used English with professors and co-workers, and Spanish with friends
and family. Thus, participants’ relationships to e-mail recipients was the determining factor for
language choice.
Another study by Sukyadi, Wirza, and Hasiani (2012) focused on the effect of gender on
code-switching and investigated the types of and reasons forcode-switching on Facebook. The
participants were 24 Facebook users (12 male and 12 female) who were English Department
10
students. They were English-Indonesian speakers. The corpus was collected from the
participants’ Facebook walls. About 688 posts were examined. After collecting data, the
participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire in order to explore the reasons for code-
switching. The findings of this study showed that participants used three types of code-
switching: intrasentential switching, intersentential switching and tag switching. The most
frequent type used was intrasentential. Also, the results showed that they switched to English
more than toIndonesian because they were students from an English department. In addition, a
process of acronymization occurred in their Facebook posts, for example, cya (see you) and bt
(bad tempered). They deleted some letters when they switched to English such as pls (please),
thx (thank) and app (approve). Regarding gender differences, the study revealed that women
used tag questions, intensifiers and endearment words more than men. Also, women used more
polite words to thank people and for apologizing and complimenting others. In view of topics,
the women preferred to talk about their relationships and feelings while the men talked about
music and technology. However, this study had a serious limitation, as it did not control the
effect of age since it included participants from various age groups.
Besides analysis of the language used on Facebook, some research has been done to
examine the language used on Twitter (e.g. Taştan, 2012). Specifically, Taştan investigated the
frequency of code-switching and the relationship between topic and the use of code-switching on
Twitter. The participants were 20 young Turkish participants whose ages ranged from 19 to
24.There were 15 females and five males. All participants were fluent in English. The researcher
collected 3,860 posts from the participants’ Twitter profiles. The posts with code-switching were
117 and they included both intersentential and intrasentential code-switching. In addition, the
11
117 posts were analyzed in terms of seven different topics, including: Internet and computers,
interests (songs, movies and series), education, entertainment, travelling, sports and other.
The results showed that code-switching was a common feature among young Turkish
speakers in online communication, particularly onTwitter. Also, it revealed that 69.23% of the
117 posts contained intrasentential code-switching, whereas 30, 7 % had intersentential code-
switching. Moreover, switching to English was used more frequently than switching to Turkish
in Twitter. With regard to topics, the results showed that participants mostly code-switched (37,
6 %; 44) within the topic of interests and far less within the topic of Internet and technology
(19,65 % -23 posts). In addition, the results showed that English was the dominant language
among young Turkish speakers on Twitter.
Besides Twitter, English was also found to be dominant in Active Worlds as reported in
the findings of a study by Axelsson, Abelin, and Schroeder (2003). They investigated how
different national languages interact in Active Worlds. Moreover, they examined when the
participants used other languages instead of English language. The data were collected by
observation of text interactions among AW users. Their findings also showed that Non-English
speakers, who are generally bilingual, were willing to switch to English even in settings where
the majority of the users were non-English speaking.
2.2. Code-switching and Gender
Gender is an important sociolinguistic factor. There have been studies done to investigate
the effect of gender on code-switching. Labov (1972), Trudgill (1974) and Chambers (2003)
showed that women used more standard forms than men in monolingual settings. In a bilingual
setting, a study by Cheshire and Gardner-Chloros (1998) examined transcribed recordings from
two immigrant communities in the United Kingdom. They found that there were no significant
12
differences between men and women in both communities regarding the use of any kind of code-
switching although there were significant differences between the two communities in terms of
the amount and type of code-switching which occurred. However, other studies have found men
and women behave differently in terms of the amount and the type of code alternation used
within a community. One of these studies was done by Haust (1995) who found that men
switched more than women, especially using discourse marker insertions, whereas women
tended to change varieties outside the turn unit.
2.3. Code-switching among Arabic-English Speakers
A substantial amount of research has been done to examine code-switching among
Jordanian Arabic-English speakers. One study by Hussein (1999) examined the attitudes of
Arabic speakers towards code-switching and the most frequent use of English expressions in the
Arabic language. The subjects of the study were college students from different majors: 86
students from the Department of Arabic, 54 students from the English Department, 109 students
from the Religion Department (Islam), 55 students in the Law Department, and 48 students in the
Computer Science Department. The subjects were selected equally in terms of gender and their
ages ranged from 19-23. The researcher hypothesized that students in the departments of Arabic
and Religion might have less favorable attitudes towards code-switching.
The instrument used in this study was a questionnaire consisting of three sections. The
first section was designed to elicit demographic information. The second one was designed to
examine students’ attitudes toward code-switching. The third section included questions about
when and why students code-switched and tried to elicit English expressions that students use
frequently. This questionnaire was administered after students listened to a short lecture titled
“Introduction to Computers and Computer Applications”.

13
To analyze this data, the researcher divided the attitudes of students towards code-
switching into four parts. The first part examined attitudes towards code-switching in relation to
Arabic; the second examined attitudes towards code-switching in relation to English; the third
focused on attitudes towards users of code-switching; the fourth was about general attitudes
towards code-switching.
The researcher concluded that students code-switched to fulfill certain language functions
which were not related to language deficiency. The researcher also reported that participants did
not agree with the statement that switching to English helps express scientific and technological
concepts better. He attributes this to the fact that the majority of his subjects were from the
Islamic and Arabic departments, where students are known to have more purist attitudes towards
Arabic. In addition, the researcher concluded that the main reason that students code-switched
was the lack of equivalent words in Arabic such as some technological concepts such as
telephone, television, etc. The most frequently used expressions by students were ok, thanks,
yes/no, sorry and please.
Another study which provided supporting results to Hussein’s (1999) was conducted by
Elsaadany (2003). Elsaadany examined code-switching among different Arab speakers. He
investigated which codes Arab speakers of different varieties and dialects used in informal
conversation. Also, his study addressed the social factors that lead Arab speakers to code-switch.
The subjects of the study were different Arab speakers, living in America from Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, Sudan, Morocco and Egypt. The data was collected from telephone conversations
between those subjects. There were 17 subjects in all, nine males and eight females. After
collecting the data, the researcher made a phonetic transcription of the conversations and
identified all instances of code-switching. The results showed that when Arabic speakers of
14
different varieties except Egyptians, talked to Egyptians, they switched to Egyptian Arabic, at the
lexical and phonological level. On the other hand, Arabic speakers switched to English for the
purpose of emphasis and clarification.
Another study by Said, Waschauer and Zohry (2007) examined code-switching among a
group of Egyptian Internet users who were Arabic-English bilinguals. The purpose of the study
was to investigate which language was used by the participants in online communication and
why. The subjects of the study were 43 young Egyptian professionals working in the field of
Information Technology. Researchers from Cairo carefully selected the participants. Their ages
ranged from 24 to 36. All of them had at least a bachelor's degree and some had a master's and/or
doctorate degrees. There were 23 men and 20 women analyzed in the study.
The researchers administered a written survey including six questions about personal
information, eight questions about language use online and eight questions about print literacy
practice. Pilot testing was used for the survey. This survey was distributed by e-mail to 43 people
who were asked to provide the researchers with samples of their e-mail messages or online chats.
Only four participants returned the survey with samples of e-mail messages, so only those four
participants were selected for interviews. Then, the researchers interviewed those four
participants and the interviews were tape-recorded.
The survey data of 43 people was analyzed regarding language, dialect and script. The
researchers used ANOVA to examine which factors correlated with online use by Egyptians. The
researchers analyzed the written transcripts of interviews. The results showed that English was
the dominant language and Romanized Egyptian Arabic was also frequently used. The
researchers explained that the participants’ long-term experience of using the Internet and
working in information technology centers correlated with the use of English.

15
Another study done by Al-Khatib and Sabbah (2008) investigated the written forms of
code-switching in text messages used by Jordanian University students. This study mainly
focused on the frequency and functions of code-switching. The corpus was collected from 46
university students. There were 17 males and 39 females whose ages ranged from 17 to 26 years.
A total of 181 messages were randomly selected. Also, a self-report questionnaire and interviews
were used. Data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results showed that code-
switching occurred more often than using only English or only Arabic in text messages. The
participants used the Roman script more than Arabic for Arabic words.
They reported that using both languages facilitated communication rather than using only
English or Arabic. As far as gender, the findings revealed that females tended to use code-
switching more than males while males preferred to use only Arabic rather than only English or
mixed elements. Moreover, the results showed that participants switched to Arabic within
English matrix sentences for religious and cultural reasons. For example, they used some
religious terms within English sentences such as Islamic greetings, inshalla ‘God willing’;
yarab‘God willing’; Allah yes3idek/yes3idak ‘May God bless you’;enshallatkoun/ tkouni b5air
‘God willing, you are ok’; ma bitqaser/ma bitqasri‘ you are always there to provide
help’;5alas‘ok then” (p.50). Also, they switched from Arabic to English for the following three
reasons: prestige, for academic or technical terms, and for euphemisms.
Overall, the main trends in the studies reviewed so far can be summarized as follows:
1) English seems to be the most dominant language used by various bilingual speakers in
their online communications as reported in the following studies: Axelsson, Abelin, and
Schroeder (2003), Goldbarg (2009), Said, Waschauer and Zohry (2007), Sukyadi, Wirza, and
Hasiani (2012) and Taştan (2012).

16
2) The switch was more often to English than to the native language of the participants
supported by Axelsson, Abelin, and Schroeder (2003), Sukyadi, Wirza, and Hasiani
(2012)and Taştan (2012).
3) Intrasentential code-switching was used more than other kinds in CMC and this was
observed primarily in informal communications rather than formal ones as shown in
Goldbarg (2009), Sukyadi, Wirza, and Hasiani (2012) and Taştan (2012).
4) Regarding the effect of gender, most of the findings reveal that females code-switched
more often than males.
5) With regard to the topic of the discourse in which code-switching occurred, research is
rather scanty and only one study (at least to the knowledge of this researcher) has
investigated the use of code-switching inrelation to topic. This study conducted by Taştan
(2012) has found that code-switching occurred mostly within topics related to movies and
songs.
6) Regarding frequently switched words, these words were English words such as
thanks,please, okay,yes, sorry, etc.
In sum, with the proliferation of technologically mediated communication, the number of
studies about the use of code on different social networks and with speakers from varied
backgrounds is on the increase. Yet, it seems (at least, to this researcher’s knowledge) that the
use of code-switching on Facebook by bilingual Arabic speakers has not been examined
sufficiently by empirical research. This realization served as the rationale for the present study
which aimed to examine the employment of code-switching among Saudi Arabic English
bilingual users of Facebook as a social network. Because most previous research findings
revealed that intrasentential code-switching was the dominant kind used in online
17
communications, the purpose of the present study was delimited to intrasentential code-
switching, excluding other types.The next chapter describes and explains the methodology of the
study.
18
CHAPTER 3
METHODOLOGY
The present chapter describes the research methodology of this study, which involved a
mixed design using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis. By its nature, the study
was exploratory and employed a data-driven approach to find patterns and types of code-
switching. This chapter contains the following sections: purpose and research questions,
variables, participants and procedure, and data analysis.
3.1. Purpose and Research Questions
The purpose of the study was to investigate the use of intrasentential code-switching by
Arabic-English Saudi users of Facebook. More specifically, the following questions guided this
investigation:
1) What is the ratio of English-Arabic and Arabic-English code-switching in Facebook
comments of Arabic-English bilingual speakers?
2) Is there a relationship between comments’ topics and the occurrence of intrasentential code-
switching?
3) What are the most commonly inserted Arabic words within English matrix sentences?
4) What are the most commonly inserted English words within Arabic matrix sentences?
3.2. Variables
The dependent variables in this study were calculated as the frequency scores of
intrasentential code-switching. The independent variable was topic of comments with 10
categories, including: 1) religion, 2) humor, 3) family and intimacy, 4) achievement, 5)
compliments and thanking, 6) makeup, 7) movies, 8) travelling, 9) technology and 10) gossip.
19
3.3. Participants and Procedures
This study pertains to the paradigm of observational study in which the researcher was
both an observer and a participant in the Facebook interactions among the participants who were
the researcher’s Facebook friends. They were homogeneous in terms of gender, origin and
education. They included 10 Saudi females who were graduate students. The researcher had
known them for 8 years since attending the same university in Saudi Arabia. The following codes
were used for the 10 participants: MG, MA, MN, KH, AH, SS, ZZ, KH, ZN, and WH.
Four of them, MG, MN, SS and KH, and the researcher used to work as teaching
assistants in the same university in Saudi Arabia. All of them later received scholarships to
pursue graduate study in the United States. MN and KH attendedthe same MA program in
Linguistics at the Universityof Essex, UK, in 2009 and graduated in 2011. In 2012, both women
started their PhD studies in linguistics. One of them moved to the University of Texas in the
U.S., and the other stayed at the University of Essex in the UK.
MG and the researcher attended the same university in the U.S. in 2010. The two other
participants- AH and MA- received scholarships from the Saudi Arabian government to attend
universities in the U.S. AH began to attend classes at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign to study computer science in 2011, while MA graduated from a finance program
from the University of Baltimore in 2012. SS chose to study linguistics at the University of
Eastern Michigan in 2010. All these 6 women and the researcher chose to stay in contact with
each other via Facebook and other social media.
Regarding the four other participants, ZZ, a sister of KH, studied chemistry at the
University of Salford Manchester in the UK. The researcher met her when she visited her friend
KH, and thus they became Facebook friends too. Furthermore, during the researcher’s time
20
studying at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, she met two additional Saudi Arabian
students, both studying education, who were Facebook friended and coded as ZN and WH. The
final participant, coded AA, was a friend of MG who was introduced to the researcher and added
as a friend after she was initially observed posting interesting comments on a mutual Facebook
friend’s wall.
Based on the friendship relationship between the researcher and participants, the real ages
of the participants were known. Their ages ranged from 23-30 years old. Regarding marital
status, MG, AA, ZZ and WH were married while the others were single.
MN and the researcher joined Facebook in 2008 and the other participants joined in 2009
and 2010. The idea for this study was conceived based on Goldbarg’s (2009) research about e-
mail communication. The researcher, admittedly a Facebook addict, got interested in finding out
whether Goldbarg’s results about code-switching in email communication will hold true in
Facebook communication too. Thus, the researcher started to observe her Facebook friends,
particularly the bilingual ones for the following two months. After this time, the researcher found
her friends’ posts very interesting in terms of language to be examined.
Once the idea was formed and the researcher had done some silent observations for her
own sake, she made an official proposal for the study and obtained permission from her 10
friends to be observed and their posts to be used for the purpose of the study. The participants
signed a Consent form in compliance with the Human Subjects Committee requirements at
Southern Illinois University. They granted their permission on the condition that their real
personalities will be kept confidential and random codes would be used to identify them.
Having received the approval of the Human Subjects Committee, the data collection
began on February 15th, 2012 and continued until January 10th, 2013 to allow sufficient data
21
samples to be available. In addition, the researcher created a discussion group including the
participants in order to get to know each other and then engage in conversation with each other.
Besides the discussion board, data was collected from their Facebook walls through looking at
the news feed. Based on the researcher’s regular use of Facebook, she checked the news
feeddaily from her laptop or from her smart phone in order to note any new wall postings.
A computer, iPhone and the Internet were used to collect the corpus. Specifically,
screenshots, “a digital image taken by the host operating system or software running on the
computer” (“Screenshot, 2011”) were used to collect data. Specifically, 100 screenshots were
taken for each participant in the study.Thus, the total of screenshots amounted to 1000.The
purpose of using screenshots was to save comments that might have been deleted by users and
thus allow the researcher to more thoroughly examine and analyze the data. Since code-
switching occurs in the context of sentences, it was required that each screenshot had to contain
at the very least a complete sentence. Therefore, data that did not contain whole sentences were
excluded from the corpus.
3.4. Analysis of the Data
The analysis of the data involved calculating frequencies, performing tests of significance
and content analysis. SPSS (Version 18.0 for Mac OS X, 10.6.8) was used to analyze the
quantitative data, and to perform tests of significance. Raw frequencies of code-switching
between Arabic and English or between English and Arabic were calculated within theten topic
areas, including 1) religion, 2) humor, 3) family and intimacy, 4) achievement, 5) compliments
and thanking, 6) makeup, 7) movie, 8) travelling, 9) technology and 10) gossip. The most
interesting instances of code-switching were identified through content analysis and used in
illustrating the quantitative data. The effect of topic on the use of code-switching was examined
22
through a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), followed by Tukey multiple comparison test.
The statistical analysis was performed at alpha =.05.
In addition, all posts were examined through content analysis and the most illustrative
ones were selected and added to the results of the study. At least one post was selected for each
topic and the instances of code-switching were highlighted. In addition, English translations were
added for instances of code-switching that involved Arabic. Also, the most commonly switched
words were identified, categorized semantically and examined in view of their occurrence within
the 10 topics. All results, quantitative and qualitative, are presented in the next chapter.
23
CHAPTER 4
RESULTS
This chapter presents the results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis. The
quantitative includes the results for: 1) overall occurrence of code-switching, 2) frequencies of
Arabic matrix sentences with intrasentential use of English words, and of English matrix
sentences with intrasentential use of Arabic words, and 3) the relationship between topic of posts
and intrasentential code-switching. The methods of analysis involved descriptive statistics and a
one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), followed by Tukey multiple comparison test.
The qualitative results illustrate types of code-switching within each of the 10 topics,
including gossip,technology topic, compliments and thanking, achievement, movies and songs,
family and intimacy, makeup, travelling, and religion. For the purpose, screenshots of the most
interesting instances of code-switching within topic are provided. Also, in this part, the most
frequently used English and Arabic words within each topic are identified.
4.1. Quantitative Analysis
As explained in the methodology, this study analyzed 1000 posts written by bilingual
Saudi female users of Facebook in order to investigate the occurrence of intrasentential code-
switching. More specifically, the first research question was formulated as What is the ratio of
English-Arabic and Arabic-English code-switching in Facebook comments by Arabic-English
bilingual speakers?
Of the 1000 posts that were collected, 560 (56%)included intrasentential code-switching,
whereas the remaining 440 (44%) were written either exclusively in English or exclusively in
Arabic. Figure 2 shows the overallpercentage of code-switching in 1000 Facebook comments.

24
Use of code switching Non-use of code switching
Non-use of code
switching
44% Use of code
switching
56%
Figure 2.Percentage of overall occurrence of intrasentential code-switching
Among the 560 posts which contained instances of code-switching, 64 % had an Arabic
matrix sentence with English words and phrases inserted within, and 36 % had an English
matrix sentence with Arabic words inserted within them. These percentages are shown in
Figure 3.
Arabic-English
English Code switching
English-Arabic
Arabic Code switching
English-Arabic
Code switching
36%
Arabic-English
Code switching
64%
Figure 3. The Ratio of Arabic-English and English-Arabic Code-switching
To address the second research question, Is there a relationship between the topic of
posts and the occurrence of intrasentential code-switching,a one-way ANOVA was employed.
The dependent variable was the frequency of using code-switching, calculated as a mean score
25
for each topic. Topic, on the other hand, served as the independent variable, including the
following 10 categories: 1) religion, 2) humor, 3) family and intimacy, 4) achievement, 5)
compliments and thanking, 6) makeup, 7) movie and songs, 8) travelling, 9) technology and 10)
gossip. It should be clarified here that topics could not be identified solely on the basis of the
frequencies of posts because often times several topics occurred on the same post. Table 1
summarizes the descriptive statistics for the frequency of code-switching for each topic.
Table 1. Frequency of Code-switching within Topic
Topic N Mean SD 95% Confidence Interval
Lower Bound Upper Bound
Gossip 10 18.90 7.06 16.422 21.378
Humor 10 12.20 6.79 9.722 14.678
Technology 10 5.30 4.08 2.822 7.778
Compliment &Thanking 10 5.00 3.30 2.522 7.478
Achievement 10 4.00 2.70 1.522 6.478
Movies & Songs 10 4.00 3.09 1.522 6.478
Family & Intimacy 10 3.20 2.53 .722 5.678
Makeup 10 2.20 2.39 -.278 4.678
Travelling 10 1.30 1.56 -1.178 3.778
Religion 10 .40 .69 -2.078 2.878
Prior to conducting the one-way ANOVA, Levene’s test was performed in order to check
for violationsof the assumption of homogenous variances. Since Levene’s test showed a
violation of the homogeneity of variances assumption, F (9, 90) = 4.66, p< .001, Fmax was
26
calculated and compared to the predicted Fmax (Kirk,1995). Since Fmax calculated = 101.71
was smaller than Fmax predicted = 106, the homogeneity of variances assumption was accepted,
following Kirk.
The omnibus ANOVA revealed that the independent variable topichad a significant effect
on the frequency of code-switching,F(9, 90) = 20.627, p< .001,Partial eta squared = .673. Both
the p-value and the higheffect size of .673 showed that the topic of the posts was a significant and
important factor in the use of code-switching.
Since there were 10 different topics in this analysis, it was necessary to perform a
multiple comparison post hoc test in order to identify the topics that were the most significantly
associated with the use ofcode-switching. The Tukey post hoc results showed that the topic
gossiphad significantly more instances of code-switching than all other 9 topics. The next topic
with the most instances of code-switching was humor, which was significantly different from the
other topic .The other 8 topics had significantly lower frequencies of code-switching and those
were not significantly different from each other. Table 2 presents the results of the Tukey
analysis for gossip and humor, the two topics within which significantly higher frequencies of
code-switching were observed. For brevity, the rest of the Tukey comparisons are not included in
the table since they were not significant.
Table 2: Tukey Comparisons at Level of Significance .05
Tukey comparisons at level of significance .05
Topic gossip humor tech compl achieve movies family makeup travel religion
& songs
thanks
Gossip _ .009 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000
Humor .009 _ .007 .000 .000 .000 .000 .004 .000 .000
27
The effect of topic is best illustrated by Figure 4 which shows how the frequency of using code-
switching varied from topic to topic, as the highest frequencies were observed within the topics
of gossip and humor.
20
18.9
18
16
Mean of Frequency
14
12 12.2
10
8
5.3 5
6 4
4 3.2
4 2.2 1.3
2
0 0.4
TOPICS
Figure 4: Plot of Topics and Frequency of Code-switching Means
4.2. Results of Qualitative Analysis
This section presents content analysis ofthe posts that included code-switching. Since the
posts were categorized into 10 different types according to their topic, the results for each type
are presented separately, starting from the topics which showed the highest occurrence of code-
switching in the following order: gossip, humor, technology, compliments and thanking,
achievement, movies and songs, family and intimacy, makeup, travelling, and religion. To
illustrate the use of code-switching, screenshots from each topic are provided. When the matrix
sentence is in Arabic, English translations are provided in boldface and are also underlined.
Sometimes participants would use an English word, but written in the Arabic script, to make the
reader aware of this, such words are color-coded in red.

28
4.2.1.Code-switching within the Gossip Topic
As already discussed in the previous section, the quantitative results revealed that the
participants code-switched more frequently in posts dealing with daily trivia, which in the
context of this thesis was named the gossip topic. The gossip topic included posts that discussed
issues related to participants’ experiences in their immediate environments (in the US and the
UK) and in their country of origin (Saudi Arabia). In Excerpt 1 (Figure 4),the first post is by the
researcher who made a comment about the possibility of a reverse culture shock when returning
to Saudi Arabia. The post was in Arabic with the English wordphobiaembeddedin the Arabic
matrix sentence (line 1). The participants who responded to the researcher’s post were MG, KH
and MN. All of them embedded English words in their posts too. MG used the English
acronymized word LOL that was written in the Arabic alphabet (line 2). In fact, the word LOL
(laughing out loud) was very frequent in the participants’ posts. Another instance of code-
switching appeared in KH and MN’s comments. KH used the English word responsible in the
function of an adjective within the Arabic sentence (Line 3), whereas MN used the English noun
phrase social lifewritten in the Arabic alphabet as illustrated in line 5 of Excerpt 1.
1/ The researcher
()
‫ "! آ ار و‬#‫ ارض ا‬%‫&" ر& ا‬
‫ "ا "ه وش اآ * ) (؟؟؟‬-‫"د‬/‫ و‬0‫ آ‬12‫ وا‬3
‫ وا‬4/ -‫ &"م ا أي ادار‬08‫ وا‬-‫ رآب ا
ر‬
When you go back home, you will have a culture shock. So I had a (phobia) of riding in a
car. Let me know about your experience.
June 17 at 6:40pm Like ·
2/ MG‫ *ء ل‬0‫ آ‬/ everything LOL

June 17 at 9:03pm via mobile · Unlike · 2
3/ KH ‫
ب هك ا? )"ة‬/ ‫ب‬2‫ ا* ا( ا‬A
‫ ا‬B‫وو‬CD ‫ ا* ه‬E "? /‫ا‬C *
I#‫ و?"رت ا‬E /‫ي & ا‬G‫ ورآ‬H‫ وا
&( هك ا ا‬1 B‫ ا‬E‫ ا( آ‬F"C‫ه & ? ا ا‬
FK‫اء درا‬K & (

‫)ر‬L A) EH‫ * ا‬0‫ وآ‬،L A))) H‫ ا‬K‫ ق را‬3!C‫ ا‬0((((‫ هك آ‬FO
‫ا‬
‫ ه‬SK‫ و‬0?& X (UV‫ن ا‬W(C! ‫ن & ل‬# SH‫ ا‬1B 0‫( اه‬P! Q‫اآه ا‬R‫ ا‬G/ / ‫ة‬/
3K‫ ! "دت ا‬F4W‫ ا‬HY‫ هك ودوا‬S‫ ق ا)"ات *آ‬E) ‫"ق‬C‫ ا‬U ‫ و‬K‫ا‬
KK K‫ و‬F & S(4 >>> -‫"دددددد‬/‫وا)"ات و‬
29
Honestly, I had a culture shock here in the UK more than at home. In the UK, I am
(responsible ) for everything such as going to the pharmacy or the bank and making all
reservations. But at home, my family, may Allah bless them, is responsible for every
thing. That is it. Thank you Soso.
June 18 at 2:10am via mobile · Unlike · 1
4/The researcher‫ !
(وو‬Thank you
June 18 at 2:55am via mobile · Like · 1
5/ MN ‫ا‬4W2 SH‫ووول !)ن إ‬# %(& ‫ وإ‬S(D" ( ) ‫ وزم‬W ‫(ن‬D"! ‫ آ_ إن اس‬E( ) & H‫أ‬
¬!A(L (
‫ه) ا‬..!!!‫ب‬U‫&( ا‬
I could not accept people here at home because they interfere in every thing. They
understood (social life )in a wrong way!.
June 18 at 4:59am · Unlike · 2
Figure 5: Excerpt 1
Except 2 (Figure 6) illustrates another use of code-switching within the gossip topic. This
time the researcher posted a message in Arabic only, however, the participants wrote in English
and inserted some Arabic words within their English sentences.Specifically, the researcher asked
the participants to write about their experience of living abroad (line 1). MN, SS, and KH
responded to her posts in more than one sentence. These sentences included different Arabic
words within English matrix sentences. Three participants used similar Arabic codes within
English matrix sentences. For example, the Arabic code y3ni (mean) was used by both MN and
SS (line 2 and line 3). Also, the word bs (but) was used by both SS and KH (line 3 and line 4).
From these examples, it can be seen that the inserted Arabic words within English matrix
sentences included some characteristics of ASCII-ized Arabic such as using the number 3 to
represent the Arabic letter (‫)ع‬/ȥ/ and the Roman alphabet as in the word (y3ni - mean).
30
1/ The researcher ‫ارا ا ان ح‬

‫ا"؟‬
Let's talk about your experience of livingabroad.
Like · · March 31at 8:01am
2/ MN For me it was horrendous..honestly, when it comes to the Brits themselves.. y3ni (I

meanthey were awful..when it comes to Mul7agiat elsharr(bad embassy) it was
horrible..so nothing really would make my experience awesome. ma3da (except)the
beautiful memories I share with the best friends in the world  
March 31 at 8:35pm · Like
3/ SSThe first 4 months when I came were horrible, I hated everything here except my
lovely room hahaha. but now I begin loving this place and Americans. They are very
friendly ma3da (except) ….. haha. ... also I have some awesome memories with my best
brother and my sister-in-law and some wonderful friends ,y3ni ( mean) girls not boys
hahaha. Honestly, there is no better than HOME. i miss everything there especially Tuna
and Tamees (kind of food)with cheese m3kum (with you) wow. bs (but)the best thing I
learned that silence and self-dependence Thanks
March 31, at 9:04pm · Like
4/ KH Hiilove .. Nice idea .

Well, i have to say that the first year was horrible everything surrounds me is very strange
even the sky i's looking at it everyday ndi's like " iwannahooooome" i's crying every single
night “no joking" bs (but)i'm a big girl now and gdnisagrah (become strong)hahaha .bs
(but) the second year when i started my MA was much much better coz my sis ZZ and MN
eduba(Naughty MN )came to the Uk and they changed my life there and i really started to
see everything wonderful. I know we faced awful memories together bs (but)still we were
"together" and i'll never forget a moment that we shed a tear or laugh together. I wont add
much on wannat moon have said abt people there either rab3ina (our people) in mul7agit
elham (bad embassy) coz they simply have an excellent degree in making your life more
complicated.bs (but) believe me that fade the moment you see your work printing.
April 1, at 4:01am
Figure 6: Excerpt 2
Another example of code-switching within the gossip topic is given in Figure 7, Excerpt
3 below. This time, the researcher did not participate in the conversation. Participant MA posted
on her Facebook wall to ask MN about an accident that had occurred at MN’s university. In her
response, MA employed the English word action within an Arabic matrix (line 1). Then, she
wrote entirely in Arabic in her second post (line 2). In response, participant KH wrote a comment
in English (line 3), but she later used Arabic in her second comment as she inserted some English
words, actions, updates and please(line 5).

31
In lines 6, 7 and 8 of excerpt 3, there was another conversation in which the participants
changed the topic from gossip to humor. The conversation in lines 1 to 5 was about the accident
that happened at KK’s University. By the end, the participants changed the topic to humor asthey
started making fun of the university’s restaurant (line 6 to 8). The next section will illustratesome
examples of code-switching within the topic of humor.
1/ MA K‫ ! ن را‬Q* ‫ ان‬Q‫ آ وا‬X "*‫ اا‬F !B (‫ا‬#‫آ‬%‫"ا?ل وش ا‬
please MN tell us all (actions) that occurred in KKU…..
15 Like ·
2/ MA MN ‫ ك ه‬X( 1!C .. ‫"ث‬W‫ ا‬3(? (K‫ ا‬H‫ا‬

Hey MN, you are our reporter about the actions in KKU
3/ KHyep MN, I am waiting for your update ،so excited :)

March 7 at 7:15pm · Like · 15Pm
Omitted comment
4/ MN‫اخ‬C‫ ا‬S &‫اأ‬R‫ آ‬X S (L‫ أ‬F

*‫ !"رون و‬SH‫ إ‬12‫ن ووا‬DC!‫ ?"وا‬3U*‫وا‬K Q‫ ت ه"اه ا‬f‫ا‬
....S‫ا"وام وده‬Dh ‫ ع‬Sf‫ آ
واا‬X(F‫ر‬4
‫ )ا‬S‫ده‬..
E
‫ !
!م ا‬Q‫ا‬
The students made a lot of mess and yelled at everyone. They destroyed the university
restaurant. At the end of day, the (secretary) stopped them
March 8 at 4:19am · Like · 1
5/ KH U H Q‫)ت '& (ا!ا‬#‫ &واآ‬+‫)ا‬S‫ ه اآ ا( &"آ‬E

W H‫ ا‬X/‫ا‬
0B‫ا‬f&
(Please) MN we need more details and (updates) about all (actions). so excited :)
March 8 at 5:14am · Like · 14
6/ MA
4‫ ا‬0‫ " !
ه‬0‫ &"ي ا‬%(& %
Sf‫اذاا‬..jPPPPD..
If the university resturant is still the same, it deserved to be destrpyed. Hhhhhhh
 March 8 at 2:19pm · Like · 3
7/KH / ‫ ق‬C& ‫ن‬fW Q‫ ا‬X ‫ ا‬XH(‫ت وآ‬B ‫ ث‬k‫ ا‬Sf‫د? ا‬B ‫ه‬
‫ ! ن‬SH!‫ و‬S ! 0‫ اآ‬%(& ‫ون ا ت‬4W!‫ اا‬X * (? "W‫&ا !ااارب ا‬H SH‫ ا‬SK‫ا‬،S
K‫و‬،‫دا‬K
S(‫ اآ‬S
Hhhhhh, I still remember the restaurant had only three kinds of sandwich that were all
cheese , Thanks Allah for the blessing huh . The funniest thing is they told students the
food is not allowed in Campus hhhhh!!
March 8 at 4:00pm · Like ·
Omitted post.
32
8/ MN‫ آن &"ازدهر‬B‫ى أ‬

.. S&‫ا‬H
‫ و‬F
! (X)H )S‫ &"ه‬W‫ا‬
(.‫ )ول‬H‫ ام ا‬PK‫ ه اذا‬X#f XH X#f‫و‬..X!!!
You have to thank God you had a cheese sandwich hhhhh. Today, they had only
(nuggets) withfrench fries as if you heated them the last day lol
March 8 at 11:23pm · Like · 1
Figure 7: Excerpt 3
4.2.2. Code-switching within the Humor Topic
The other topic which elicited a higher number of code-switching was titled humor.
Specifically, posts which used jokes, made jokes, or ridiculed things and/or people were
classified under this topic. Sometimes, two topics could be found within the same conversation
as already seen in Excerpt 3 which pertains to two topics, gossip and humor. In the beginning,
the participants discussed an accident at one participant’s university, but later participant MA
initiated changing the topic from gossip to humor. She started to make fun of the university
restaurant using Arabic (line 6). KH responded to MA’s comment and she also used Arabic (line
7). However, participant MN switched to English (lines 4 and 8). She used the acronym LOL
(= laughing out loud) and the food name nuggets within Arabic matrices.
Another example is shown in excerpt 4 (Figure 8), where the researcher posted a picture
with a comment written in English. However, none of the participants responded to this post in
English. Some wrotein Arabic and switched to English and some (SS and WH) responded in
Arabic only (line 4 and 10).The most frequent English word in this post was married that was
written in the Arabic alphabet (Lines 2, 5 and 8). Also, the word status was used by two
participants, AH (line2) and MN (Line 7). Also, ZN (Line3) and MG (Line 9) used the word
comment. Other English words were amazing, kids and story.

33
1/ The researcher if you want to get married, you have to update your Facebook status, lol.
this is marriage ceremony nowadays.
October 14, via mobile LikeShare
2/ AHL‫ زم ا‬fP H‫ "ام ا‬0‫ ا‬-(/ -4 Q‫(وا‬,-) ‫( ل‬+.‫ ا"رج ا )ا‬I)/‫ن ا‬V&
0B‫(او‬+ ‫ر‬/‫)ــ‬. .
It is a good idea , so I have to change my (status ) to (engaged) and after then change
to (married)
June 14, at 8:23am · Like · 2
3/ ZN‫( " ؛‬1)‫ا

ك )آ‬C‫ه‬-)
huh it is Facebook time ،really (no comment).
June 14, at 8:24am · Like
4/ SS jPPPPPPP(‫(ها‬W‫ه‬4
huh, it is really a good idea.
June 14, at 9:06am · Like
Omitted post
5/ ZZ"(,/-‫ ل )ا‬/L‫ ز‬0‫(ا‬+ ‫ووول)ر‬

After (Christmas), I have to change my status to( married lol)
June14, at 12:56pm · Like
6/ kh‫ &(اول ول‬+‫ )ا‬f ‫ و‬-‫ر‬C‫ (ا‬, ‫ه )اااا‬

(Nice) picture hhhh, u have to write the (updates) day by day.
June 14 , at 3:33pm · Like
7/ MNjPPPPD.(X
‫ف )ا‬VH ‫ و&) ل‬mother to a dozen
AH, I will wait to change your (status) as "mother to a dozen" huh
June 14, at 3:35pm · Like · 1
8/AA -‫(ررررر‬3&‫ز( ه )ا‬+‫ )آ‬k ( + ‫) ر‬3‫و ! اآ‬G W‫ ا‬H‫ ا‬3#
So (amazing) .so I am already married, so should I change my status to (married) with
two (kids) hhhhhh
June14, at 4:19pm · Like
9/ MG ‫ه‬AA E / (E‫ا درزن )آ‬

I love AA (comment), wow a dozen hhhhhh
June 14, at 8:32pm · Like
34
10/ WHjPPPP‫رره‬C‫ ا‬E /

I love the picture hhhhh
October 14, 2011 at 10:17pm · Like · 1
11/ MA(‫ري‬-) -(/ ‫ه‬

The (story) is beautiful hhhhhhhh
October 15, at 12:40am · Like
Omitted post
Figure 8: Excerpt 4
4.2.3. Code-switching within the Technology Topic
The thirdtopic which elicited fairly frequent use of code-switching was the topic of
technology. Under this topic, the participants discussed different issues related to new
technology. For example, some of them talked about new Smartphone or laptop brands,
particularly Apple products. Others talked about technical problems related to Facebook or
computers. One particular pattern that was observed within this topic was that none of the
participants switched to Arabic when they discussed technical issues. They usually switched to
English within Arabic matrix sentences or they wrote entirely in English. Excerpts 5 and 6
(Figures 9 and 10) illustrate how the participants inserted English terms within Arabic discourse.
In excerpt 5, participant MA posted on her wall about an Apple conference. She wrote
entirely in Arabic (Line 1). Participant AH responded to MA’s post in English (Line 2). An
instance of Arabic-English code-switching appeared in the third post that was written by
participant MN when she recommended to AH to buy an iPad with an AT&T contract. She used
the English word contract within an Arabic sentence. She also wrote some English names in the
Arabic alphabets such as AT&T was written as “"H“and “ Verizon” as “‫ن‬G!‫( ”ا‬Line 3). Then,
participant AH closed the conversation by writing entirely in Arabic. She thanked MN for her
advice (Line 4).

35
1/MA ‫ !ود‬-‫ و‬/!:)

‫ &ي‬K‫ا‬O ‫ ام‬0‫ ا( وز&ها‬-&"‫ا‬... -&"‫ ا‬%/
‫ااااااااااااااس‬/:)
Hey guys, do not miss Apple conference next week, I love its invitation, exciting !!!
2/AH yupyup, i'll buy one of those wonderful iPads

March 2 at 1:05am · Like
3/MN W!V( W ‫ن‬V& (6 +‫ ا‬6) (1‫ ب)آاآ‬0UV! (‫ا*ي ا‬.. -" H‫ون و ?و‬G!‫)ا‬W!*‫ا‬

Ok AH, but buy it with AT&T (contract), it is better than Verizon .
March 2 at 1:05am · Like
4/AH‫ و‬WC‫ووو !
(ع ا‬3
Thank you for your advice.>
March 2 at 1:10 am · Like
Figure 9: Excerpt 5
Excerpt 6 presents another example of code-switching within the topic of technology.
The theme of the post was buying iPhone 4S. The researcher participated in this post and wrote
entirely in English responding to participant MA’s post. Participant MA also wrote entirely in
English in her first (Line 1) and second (Line 3) comments. Then, she switched to Arabic(Line 4)
after a non-participant posted (omitted post). Participants ZZ and KH code-switched to English
when they responded to MA’s comment (Line 5 and 6). Based on all participants’posts within
the topic of technology, the most commonly inserted English words were technical terms such as
computer, keyboard, laptop, addiction, iPhone, iPad, application, screen, wall, comment, post,
and a few others.

36
1/MA
May 17, near Owings Mills, MD via mobile
To buy iPhone 4S, or not to buy iPhone 4S, that's the question :D
61Like ·
2/The researcher no, in my opinion just wait till they release iphone 5, did they release this
one or not yet?
May 17, at 7:05am · Like
3/MAaaaaaaaah, wrong answer. I wanted you to say YES grrrrr. What you said makes so
much sense though
May 17, at 7:37am · Like
Omitted post
4/MA ‫ "ري‬Q‫و ا‬.. ! !‫ ار} ا

د‬E? ‫ ص‬D H‫ أ‬BCP‫ ا*ي ه‬E
W ‫ و‬0‫ ا‬0W ‫ !م‬S‫ آ‬0 ? E/‫ر‬
R/ j f ‫)&(~?ب‬#‫ا آ‬+‫) ا‬f&‫أ‬،‫ي‬K ‫ي‬K ‫"م‬PK‫!؟!وش ا‬
I do not know. I went to Apple store and thought to buy Iphone 4 days ago, but because i
will go home recently, I doubt to buy this iphone. It is useless to use Siri in Saudi Arabia,
Do you think that if i ask Siri to give me (direction) to the nearest restaurant.
May 24 at 4:34am · Like · 1
5/ ZZ( )‫ إ*&ت & ا!ن‬E(# ‫ و‬..‫ اآ ) ر( و‬W)!( -) ‫اآ‬
There are rumors that tell that(screen) of iphone5 is bigger than 4
May 24 at 4:35am · Like
6/KHF8U EH‫ (ا*ي وأ‬1+‫) ا‬F(4V ‫اذا&"ك‬K (‫ أ‬V!~( #‫&"ي )أدآ‬H‫أ‬....
V#‫( اذا‬D
4!‫آك !م أ‬R‫ و‬SH‫ي ه‬K }
!!
I am so (addicted) to Apple, so if you have (budget), you have to close your eyes and buy
it, It is good if you feel bored, you will talk with Siri .
Figure 10: Excerpt 6
4.2.4. Code-switching within the topic of Complimenting and Thanking
A special topic was designated to two related speech acts, complimenting and thanking. Within
this topic, participants posted compliments on pictures and videos or thank you notes regarding
birthday wishes or invitations, requests for friendship or a reply. Excerpt 7 (Figure 11)
illustrates some examples of code-switching. In Line 1, MG wrote her post in English and
switched to Arabic two times, using the Arabic equivalent for thank you very much
“shukranjazila” and the Arabic word for honey, as a form of address. The same participant MG
37
wrote in English in her second comment and only inserted the Arabic code “3m” (line 4)
responding to the non-participant post in which she recommended to her to translate her post in
Arabic (omitted post). The opposite pattern was observed in the post by participant ZN, who
wrote in Arabic, but inserted the English word thanks within her Arabic sentence (line 3).
1/ MG thanks AA for the wonderful night yesterday and I do not know how to thank you and
shukranjaziila (thanks so much) for every thing…may Allah give you all what you desire
,,,,love you ya3sal (honey)
64Unlike ·
2/ AAI have lost all my words when I read yours OMG that so sweet MG I don't think that I
deserve all that I never makes you feel happy as you did always with me thank you honey, love
you more
3/ ZN0?& ? X!‫ ز‬/" Q‫(ا‬,9)‫ آ(ول‬EG& ‫!م‬
OMG, why you did not praise me like her when I invited you lol, just say (thanks)
March 9 at 4:52am via mobile · Like · 2
Omitted post
4/ MG I just said thanks *_* You have to use 3m (uncle) google translator.
March 9 at 5:52am via mobile · Like · 1
4.2.5. Code-switching within the topic of Achievement
Since all the participants were enrolled in graduate degree programs of study, it was
unsurprising to find posts related to academic achievement. That is why a special topic was
designated to such posts most of which referred to accomplishments, such as submitting papers,
graduation, etc. Excerpt 8 (Figure 12) shows instances of Arabic-English code-switching which
occurred in some participants’ comments. In line 1, when participant SS posted on her Facebook
wall about the approval of her thesis proposal, she switched to English by inserting English
38
words such as proposal and approved. Interestingly, the participant used the Arabic alphabet for
the English word proposal and the Roman alphabet for approved. In response, the researcher
wrote an encouraging comment in English within which she used the Arabic word for friend.
(Line 2). The other participants posted comments in Arabic and switched to English or wrote
entirely in Arabic when they congratulated SS. The most often used English word was the degree
term PhD.
1/SS (4 ‫ آن‬S‫ آ‬S4D‫? ل)ازال( ا‬H4K‫ءر‬8&‫ا‬V8)?
‫&و‬K"
" (approved)" 0?‫( ( او‬K‫ءآ ا‬8&‫"ا‬/‫ ا‬E/# ‫"ان‬BCD‫و‬4‫ ا‬V‫ ا‬-‫ وا
ااد‬-‫ و‬W‫ ا‬
&2 ‫ؤ ? ل‬
(? ‫ ع‬G! (‫د } آ‬K ‫*رك‬H‫ا‬H‫"!)ا "وها‬B ‫ا‬D‫ ا‬D‫"ا ا‬
Y‫ و&) اال
( ا‬P‫اا‬R 3U‫ ا‬-&‫( اود‬4‫اء‬K &‫ د‬04 ‫ص‬D4V
After an hour of stress and interest, my thesis (proposal) was approved by the committee.
The word (approved) had a lot of happy meaning. However, there was one of committee
made more stressed because of her many questions. By the way, I want to share this good
news to my mother, sisters, brothers and friends. Thanks for supporting me.
19Like · Share 
2/The researcher: congrats, I know you can do it. Proud of you (9adigati (friend)
March 28, at 11:20pm · Unlike · 1
3/ KH‫ف‬D (& Q"D ‫ ا~م‬%‫وإ‬, /H ‫ و‬F)k‫وا‬

(!‫ !و‬F(K~ )!‫ ر‬EVH ( ‫!و‬
O Praise to God I am sure that you will succeed, keep going
But told me who asked you many questions.
March 28, at 11:21pm · Unlike · 1
4/ SS ! ‫ !
"ك‬Q‫ا‬KH ‫و&) اااا‬
(K‫ ا‬3)!‫ ر‬EVH ‫ري‬G/
Thank you KH, but guess who asked me !!!
March 28 at 11:22pm · Unlike · 1
5/ MN‫ا((( !) !رب‬..‫<يوا;( "ه‬%‫و&) ل

( *دة )ا‬
May God bless you, I hope to get( MA) and (PhD) soon.
March 28 at 11:29pm · Unlike · 2
6/ MG ‫ن م‬4 ‫ ورك‬H‫ ا‬-"‫ وآ‬Q‫ذن ا‬P ‫ااو‬R‫ا_ وووك !?!ه‬

Congratulation, this is the beginning so I am sure everything is going very well.
March 29 at 12:48am · Unlike · 1
39
7/ MA‫(ة‬/! ‫ وووك‬...‫ !) !رب‬Q‫وا‬

Congratulation, May God bless you.
March 29 at 4:12am · Unlike · 1
8/SS ‫ اا‬/! ‫ي(

(ا‬+#‫ )ا‬4(44‫و&) ااا‬
S4VW! ‫ر‬
Thanks all, I hope all get (PhD)soon.
March 29 at6:04am · Like
In excerpt 9 (Figure 13), participant MA placed an English comment about a graduation
ceremony on her Facebook wall (Line 1). In her second comment, she used Arabic and inserted
the English word “Yes, Yes” (Line 2). In their Facebook posts about achievements, the
participants rarely inserted Arabic words within English matrix sentences, but they often inserted
English words within Arabic matrix sentences. The most commonly inserted English words
within Arabic sentences were master and PhD (Lines 3 and 6).
1/MA Getting ready for the graduation ceremony :D It will be streamed live on
http://www.ubalt.edu/ if you want to watch it.
195Like · · Share
Omitted post
2/MA ‫اااس‬/( ,
.). H"& ٤ F&
‫( "أا‬W‫ى‬.. S‫ &"آ‬١٢ ‫"ري‬١١!
(yes, yes) so excited, it will start at 4 pm, that is 11 or 12 pm in Saudi.
May 19 at 9:51pm · Like · 1
3/ AH‫ (!"!&) !ااااااااااارب‬-/‫ج )وا‬P‫ا وآ‬4)(H!&!"‫(آ‬W‫)&"ه‬W
& !
May God bless you, Congratulations for your graduation from (Master) and I hope to get
a job soon
May 19 at 11:26pm · Like · 1
4/ KH ‫ ا_ ا_ ا_ ا_ اااااا! وووووووووك‬H& ‫ ووووو‬S# ‫ااس‬/ -‫ررررر‬
Wow it is so exciting , MA congratulations
40
5/ MN‫ااااااااا‬.....‫أ_ أ(((((_ أ(((((((_ رووووووك‬.. E‫ رررة د‬H‫ ا‬Q‫ا(( !ووو) !رب وا‬
FH‫ا‬/!..‫ن د‬4!
‫!اارب‬
May God bless you, Congratulations. I cried out of joy. I hope that I could watch it
 May 20 at 6:57am · Like · 1
6/ MA ‫ي(?! رب‬+#‫ ب)ا‬S4 ‫ رك‬H ‫ و &) ل‬S4 ‫ ! رك‬Q‫ا‬..

Thanks all and I hope all of you get (PhD) soon
May 20 at 6:59am · Like · 1
4.2.6. Code-switching within the topic of Movies and Songs
Since the participantswould often discuss movies and songs in their posts, a special topic
was designated to them. One pattern that emerged was that the language of the movie or song
influenced the choice of language in the main posts. For example, when the movie was in
Arabic, the main post was in Arabic with occasional English words (See Figure 14, Excerpt 10).
However, the language of the comments for the main post varied. Excerpt 10 shows a discussion
about the Arabic Egyptian movie Black Honey, where the first post by KH is in Arabic with two
instances of code-switching, film and funny.The word film appeared in comments 2 and 3 as well.
Then, in comment 4, participant AH responded entirely in English. Further in lines 5, 6, and 7,
the participants used several English words, thank you, class, very much and again when
commenting on the main actor’s use of these specific words within his Arabic speech. In fact,
KH complimented him on his pronunciation of the English words thank you and again.
41
1/KH F!G(H‫ا‬FU S( (/"/‫د –ا‬K‫ ا‬0

& (=')
www.youtube.com(6)) -‫د! ر‬K‫ ا‬0
&(=' )! S(/"/‫ & ا‬0 }f)
It is a beautiful short shot of (film) Black Honey" for the actor Ahmad Helmy. It is very
(funny).
184Unlike · · Share
2/ SS! } -‫( رررر‬/"/‫)ا?اام(ا‬

Ahmad's (films) are very amazing, I love them.
3/ MN!*….. -"&‫ &)! آ((((((*( )'=(وا‬K! ‫رل‬B !" V‫ ا‬XH‫ور ان ا‬. }Y‫ رااااااا‬0
He is really the best actor, I usually watch (his film) every night,
March 8 at 6:34pm · Unlike
4/AHI love all of his movies

5/ MA ‫"ق‬B H‫ ا‬Q‫واهههههههههههه و ا‬.. F!‫ر‬C‫ ا‬X!‫ا "ر‬F‫ داه‬H‫ودا‬..8‫ و‬H 3&
‫ه‬V X (- )%(& I(! -H‫ ا‬E‫آ‬
Hhhhhhh, I hate Egyptian teachers, but I wait him to criticize the word (thank you)
6/ The researcher‫ات )آ?س(ه‬R -‫ (ن ر‬f)(‫ ا&" ه‬3/‫ا‬

I love this shot, especially when he imitated her in the word (class)
March 8 at 7:21pm · Like ·
7/ KH ‫( ?ل‬. ‫ )ا‬E)!‫ي ;(و‬A) ‫"م‬CH‫ه اآ* & و‬
:‫اد‬R‫ ! ه‬4(!?H‫اااد‬
Hhhhhh, I loved his pronunciation for the word (very much) and (again) I love this
actor.
March 8 at 7:30 pm · Like · 1
Another example of code-switching occurred in a participant’s main post about
Christmas music. In excerpt 11, participant SS used the Arabic verb asma3 within an English
sentence since she talked about an English song (Line 1). Also, participant AH switched to
Arabic using a religious phrase when she responded to SS (Line 4). However, participants KH
and MN did not switch at all. Their comments were entirely in English (Lines 3 and 4).
42
1/ SS In Starbucks asma3 to Christmas music in the background. It makes me feel happy yet
guilty..hmmmm — at Barnes & Noble Booksellers.
64Unlike ·
2/ KHYaaaaay wonderful. never ever feel guilty of having fun ndrelax just chill out with
their chritmas music esp in starbucksi used to go with ZZ regularly during christmas coz of
their music looool.
November 11 at 1:28pm · Like · 2
3/ MNYes..theirxmas music is the best..I remember I's going to buy their CD, but thanks God
I didn't  November 11at 3:06pm · Like · 2
4/ AHYaaaaaay MA its great felling ,inshallah (God willing )i will try it soon ;-p
November 12 at 11:55am · Like · 2
4.2.7. Code-switching within the topic of Family and Intimacy
Within the topic of family and intimacy, participants posted pictures or information
related to family members or friends. One interesting pattern that was observed was that the
married participants posted more posts within this theme compared to those who were single.
Excerpt 12 presents one example of English-Arabic code-switching that participant WH used in
her main post about her wedding anniversary. She wrote the post in English and inserted a
religious Arabic word Alhamdulillah within the English matrix sentence (Line 1). Participant
ZN responded in Arabic, using ASCII-ized Arabic, with two English words and and happy.
(Line 2). Then, WH thanked her in Arabic.
1/ WH Yesterday was my 9th wedding anniversary, It was unforgettable day. Thank you
…….♥ Alhamdulillah (thank God the Almighty)for giving us the most wonderful kids and
the blessed life together.
16Like ·
2/ZN allahykhaleekom laba3a9' and yj3al ayamkomkolha happy ..

May God keep you together and make all your days happy
July 3 at 2:29am via mobile · Like
3/ WH /‫ًا‬4* ‫ ا !رب‬Ameen, Thank you friend

July 3 at 2:29am via mobile · Like . 1
43
The next excerpt (Figure 17) shows an example of Arabic-English code-switching. In
excerpt 13,participant MG posted a picture with a comment describing her daughter . She wrote
in Arabic in the Arabic alphabet and inserted two English words cute and adorable that
described her daughter (Line 1). The researcher responded in English (line 3), and participant
AA responded entirely in Arabic (line 2).
1/ MG ‫)اااا‬V&‫ اااوأ‬/‫أ‬... ‫ &ي‬0‫ وآ‬H‫ د‬0‫ آ‬E ‫ه‬... F‫!" "ر‬G!‫!"و‬G! / ‫ !م‬0‫)آادورا (آ‬EH‫آ‬
‫*( أ!ووووووب‬.... E(# F(‫ آ‬E!"‫و‬H& E!"‫"!و‬... ! W ‫ر‬
‫ي ود&ا‬2‫ر‬W‫او هو‬....
I love my daughter. How (cute and adorable) she is my best love who increases day by
day
Unlike ·
2/ AA !‫ر‬R‫ !( ا‬Q‫ ا‬0‫ اآ‬0‫ &( آ‬Q‫ ا‬SK‫ !(م !( ا‬Q‫ ا‬/L‫ و‬/ ‫و! رك‬W! Q‫ا‬
‫!رب‬FWC‫ا‬
May God bless her, you should spoil her, no one will blame you.
November 7 at 10:48am via mobile · Like · 1
3/ The researcher so cute May God bless her *_*

November 7 at 10:50am via mobile · Like · 1
4/ MG h S(‫ا‬... (? ‫ ع‬L‫و‬G!G& 0‫(( آ‬P!‫و‬...

Amen, May all keep all your best people ..
November 7 at 10:54am via mobile · Like
4.2.8. Code-switching within the topic of Makeup
Although a special topic was designated to make-up, the participants did not write many
posts within this topic. Among the small number of posts, there were a few posts including code-
switching. For example, Excerpt 14 shows some examples of Arabic-English code-switching in
the participant’s discussion about make-up. MA posted a comment in Arabic about how she
learned to use an eye-liner from a video with a link to the video. All the inserted English words
were related to makeup and beauty. Among these words, the most frequently used was makeup
44
and the words foundation and brush appeared once each. In addition, the word tutorial was used
by KH when she also referred to learning how to apply make-up.
1/MA() ? ‫ ( ()ا‬f)‫اا‬R‫(ا ووط ه‬6‫آ‬/

‫ب ا‬/‫ا)ا‬R‫ه‬.. (‫آ اش ا‬W K -‫رر‬
"PK‫ا‬
This is (Smokey make up) and I learn from this video how to use (eye liner), it is very easy
.
Kim Kardashian Smokey Eyes www.youtube.com

5Like · · Share
2/ SS }‫ب(آ اآرره‬/‫)ا‬H (4*

It seams you love makeup , I hate it
July 5 at 8:56pm · Like
3/ MA
SS .I'm an obsessed, MACK-UP freak I love it
July 6 at 6:50am · Like · 2
4/ KH X‫)ب(ا"ا‬FK‫
و‬H X/‫ ا‬S! ‫ ان‬SL‫(ر‬/ -(‫( و )ش‬# +‫ و& )و‬Hk(‫ اج)ر ل‬E‫آ‬H‫ا‬
‫ اب‬D‫<ا‬
I watched another (tutorial), I like the (foundation) and (brush), I am so addicted to
(makeup)
July 6 at 6:58am · Like · 2
4.2.9. Code-switching within the topic of Travelling
Another topic of Facebook communication was the one of travelling. Participants posted
pictures or videos describing their trips to different places. These posts were mainly written in
Arabic with a few instances of English words inserted within the Arabic matrixes. Excerpt 15
below shows a post by MN who posted a video about her trip to Europe with her family and
sister. The responses to that video were in Arabic with the English words journey, tour, summer,
and expletives like double like and triple like inserted within the Arabic sentences.
45
1/ MN (/-)‫ ( ~ورو‬6‫ي)ار‬R‫ه‬2011..‫ ا!ض‬/‫?وا‬4* E ‫اق ه‬-F/‫ا"و‬-

Hf!.‫إوووي‬
This is our journeyto Europe in summer 2012. My sister came from Chicago and my
family and I came from Riyadh-Qatar- UK
My journey to Europe ♥
www.youtube.com
9Unlike · · Share 
Omitted post
2/ SS ‫ ؟؟؟؟؟‬S4"! (‫ )ر‬S‫هآ‬
Do you have tour help you???
February 15 at 7:15am · Like · 2
3/MN nope nope

February 15 at 12:49pm · Unlike · 1
4/KH ‫} ?( &( ا(

ق ا)اارب وااااوهد‬f) *‫ (((( واآ‬X ‫ه‬
&‫ رووووو‬%‫ و‬%‫} آ‬f)‫ ا‬X E
H ‫رز!و&"&د‬C(1 +‫ت)ا‬H‫ا‬H‫ا‬
wow amazing and fun, espicially who rides a boat. I wait your (update) of photo as you
promised , However, this video was enough:/
February 15 at 12:56pm · Like · 2
5/MA ! 0‫د‬.. ‫ت‬4! ( ‫ة ي‬W‫} ا‬#)‫ر و ا‬C‫ ا‬.. Q‫اااااااا*ءا‬BH‫ة و ا! أا‬8P‫ا‬
.. ‫ اآ‬S(‫ ا‬0
4‫ ا‬4 ‫ ا‬E(? ‫ر!د‬C‫( ا‬#"?.. f/ (? _?‫ و‬Q‫ رك ا‬Q‫را *ءا‬DF(/‫ر‬
f!‫را‬B3> ..W‫ ةا‬D‫ا‬B S4H‫ا‬BCDFK 0‫ اآ‬-‫آرو‬
Double like, no notriple like the scenes are so beautiful, waterfall, trees particularly Italy, I
asked you to post photos but you are lazy. by the way It was awesome trip, do it again in
future
February 15 at 6:14pm ·Like · 3
4.2.10. Code-switching within the topic of Religion
Out of the entire corpus of 1000 posts, there were 91 posts related to religion. However,
out of these 91 posts, only 4 posts were written in English and contained instances of code-
switching to Arabic. The other 87 posts were written entirely in Arabic and contained no
instances of code-switching.The following excerpts (16, 17, 18, and 19) show the posts in which
the participants inserted Arabic words within English sentences.

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1/AH Ramadan Mubarak (Have blessed Ramadan) & may Allah bless you in this holy month
& may Allah accept your fasting
It is tough to fast especially in such hot long summer days, however you can feel happiness in
the air and among people for finally having Ramadan starting tomorrow! And God is so
generous. After announcing that tomorrow is the first day of Ramadan, it started to rain and the
temperature dropped even the kids couldn't play at the park without putting on sweaters though
it was steaming hot in the afternoon!!That was God's gift. Alhamdulellah (Thanks
God)  August 18near Champaign, IL
In Excerpt 16, AH posted a comment about the onset of Ramadan and the sudden
favorable change in the weather that would make the fast easier. She expressed thanks to God for
the cooler temperatures and when she referred to Ramadan and God, she used the corresponding
Arabic words, Ramadan Mubarak and Alhamdullellah in her otherwise fairly long English post.
Excerpt 17 shows another similar instance of code-switching within an English matrix sentence
posted by AH. Here, AH used the Arabic word for pilgrims hijjaj.
1/ AH May God save all hijjaj (pilgrims) who have arrived from all the corner of the world
wishing to perform the fifth pillar of Isalm
October 24 like · Share
InExcerpt 18, SS posted a comment in English with the phrase our sins switched to
Arabic and written in the Roman alphabet “thnobna”.
1/ SS May God forgive thnobna(our sins) in this holy month.

July 2 2Unlike · Share

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Excerpt 19 shows a similar pattern, where MN made a comment in English with a
number of Arabic words used within the English matrix. All these words were of religious
nature, Alhajj (pilgrimage), Jum’ah Mubarakah(Have a blessed Friday) and Inshallah (God
willing).
1/ MN t's Friday, the first day of ALhajj (pilgrimage), so Jum'ahMubarakah (Have a

blessed Friday) for all muslims. AND Don't forget that Eid is coming soon inshallah
(God willing).^-^
October 26 9like · Share
4.2.11. Summary of commonly switched words
Summing up the instances of code-switching, including the ones discussed so far and
others not included in the examples, this section offers a summary of the most commonly
inserted Arabic words within English matrix sentences as well as a list of the most commonly
inserted English words within Arabic sentences. These words are not presented within topic, but
rather are classified into four semantic groups according to their meaning, including religious
terms, technical terms, academic terms, and miscellaneous other words. Table 3 summarizes the
most commonly inserted English words within Arabic matrix sentences. As seen from the table,
the greatest variety of English words were used in relation to computers and Internet, followed
by academic terms and miscellaneous other words. It should also be noted that no English terms
were used in reference to religion.

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Table 3: English words inserted within Arabic Sentences
Religious words Technical terms Academic Terms Miscellaneous words
None keyboard, computer, Master, PhD, details,
post, comment, lap, dissertation, updates,thanks, but,
film, video, music, thesis, proposal, and, yes, please, cute,
status, music, wall, class, admission cool, amazing, too
tag, like, email, much, honey, LOL
share,mobile, online
The same semantic categories were used to summarize the Arabic words inserted within
English matrix sentences. Table 4 shows two categories of Arabic words, mainly religious terms
and miscellaneous other words. None of the inserted Arabic words belonged to the categories of
Technical and Academic terms.
Table 4: The Most Commonly Inserted Arabic words within English matrix sentences
Religious words Technical Terms Academic Terms Miscellaneous words
Insha Allah (God willing) None None 7lo/ 9amar (beautiful)

Masha Allah (God has y3ni/qasdi (mean)
willed it), bs(but)
Sub7an/subhan Allah shokran(thanks)
(Glorious is God) a3ref (I know)
Hamdulillah(Thanks to 7abibaty (my
God) love)ma3da(except)
Mubarak (Holy) 3ajbni (like)
Wallah( Swear to momkin(maybe)
God)Ameen, Yarab(O
Allah)
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In addition to Arabic words, participants also used ASCII-ized Arabic within English
matrix sentences. The most common instances of ASCII-ized Arabic are summarized in Table 5.
Table 5:Common instances of ASCII-ized Arabic
Arabic Letters ASCII-ized Arabic Phonetic Value (IPA)
‫ح‬ 7 /Ƕ/
‫خ‬ 7' /x/
‫ص‬ 9 /s'
‫ط‬ 6 /t'/
‫ع‬ 3 /ȥ/
‫غ‬ 3' /ǳ/
‫ق‬ 8 /g/
‫ء‬ 2 /Ȥ/
So far this chapter presented the results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the
data. In addition, the qualitative data was illustrated by relevantscreenshots from the participants’
Facebook communication. In the next chapter, these results will be discussed and interpreted in
view of their relationship to existing theory and research and their implications for future
investigations of code-switching on social networks.

50
CHAPTER 5
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
This study aimed to investigate the occurrence of code-switching, a common
sociolinguistic phenomenon, on the social network Facebook as a relatively new medium of
social interactions.This chapter puts together the results of the study with related theory and
research. It also outlines the main limitations of the study and offers recommendations for further
research. The chapter ends with the main conclusions of the study.
5.1. Discussion
Specifically, this study focused on the employment of intrasentential code-switching in
the Facebook interactions of 10 Saudi female Facebook friends who were connected by their
knowledge of Arabic as a native language and English as a second language, their common
religion, their similar ages, and the fact that they were all college students. The first question that
this research aimed to answer was to provide a rough estimate of the frequency of occurrence of
Facebook posts with code-switching among a representative sample of Facebook posts. The
results showed that the presence of code-switching was more frequent than the use of one single
code. Specifically, out of the 1000 posts collected for this investigation, 560 (65%) contained
intrasentential code-switching, whereas the remaining 440 (44%) were written eitherentirely in
English or entirely in Arabic.
This finding provides further evidence to empirically founded claims (e.g. Goldbarg,
2009) that there is a relationship between language choice and the social distance between the
interlocutors. In the case of code-switching, it has been found that itoccurs primarily between
bilingual interlocutors in informal communications. In the context of this study, the extensive
51
occurrence of code-switching can be explained by the nature of Facebook which allows people to
engage in informal exchanges and to share their interests with friends and family (Veer, 2011).
Since the participants of the present study were close friends who had common beliefs and
backgrounds, their frequent use of code-switching is not a surprise in view of related theory and
research.
Regarding the ratio ofEnglish-Arabic and Arabic-English code-switching, the descriptive
results reveal that about 64% of posts contained inserted English words within Arabic sentences,
whereas 36 % had inserted Arabic words within English matrix sentences. This finding showed
that the participants switched to English more often than to Arabic. It further supportsthe results
of several studies (e.g. Axelsson, Abelin& Schroeder (2003); Sukyadi, Wirza, &Hasiani (2012);
Taştan, 2012) which found that switching to English was dominant among their participants’
communications via Facebook, Active Worlds and on Twitter. One possible explanation could be
found in the fact that all the participants, as mentioned in the methodology, were residing in
English speaking countries at the time of the data collection process. Therefore, in addition to
other shared things, they were all influenced by an English-speaking environment, where specific
cultural terms were easier to access in English than in Arabic. This fact was well illustrated by
the wide use of English words all of which related to their immediate surroundings, such as
Master, PhD, dissertation, thesis, proposal, class, admission, details, updates, thanks, but, and,
yes, please, cute, cool, amazing, too much, honey, LOL, keyboard, computer, etc.
Another issue of interest to this study was to investigate a possible relationship between
the frequency of using intrasentential code-switching and the topic of the exchange. For the
purpose, the data was coded and categorized into 10 topics of communication exchanges,
52
including: gossip, humor, technology, compliment and thanking, achievement, movies and
songs, family and intimacy, makeup, travelling, and religion.
The statistical analysis revealed that topic had a significant relationship with the
frequency of using code-switching. In other words, not all topics elicited the same frequency of
code-switching. Specifically, the topics within which code-switching was most frequently
employed were gossip and humor. This finding can be explained by the close relationship
between the participants and the casual nature of their communication. Also, the fact that they
were all in English speaking environments increased the likelihood of their using English words
within Arabic matrix sentences, especially on topics of daily happenings. These results support
Taştan’s results (2012) according to which topic had a significant effect on the use of code-
switching on Twitter. Since the present study operationalized topic into ten categories, whereas
Taştan had 7 categories (internet and computers, interests (songs, movies and series), education,
entertainment, travelling, sports and other) and in addition the categories of the two studies are
not exactly the same, the results cannot be directly compared and verified. However, the fact
that both this study and Taştan’s found a significant relationship between topic and the use of
code-switchingisimportant empirical evidence that future research should take into consideration
and explore further.
With respect to the most frequently inserted English and Arabic words, this study looked
at four semantic categories, including religious, technical, academic, and miscellaneous terms.
The qualitative analysis showed an interesting difference between the semantics of English and
Arabic words. Whereas the English words were mostly related to computers, internet, and
academics, with also a number of everyday miscellaneous words, the Arabic words were
53
predominantly religious terms and miscellaneous daily terms. All in all, it seemed as if English
and Arabic terms were in complementary distribution within the four semantic categories.
However, the distribution of these four semantic categories of words was not so clear cut
in relation to the topic of the posts. Although more technical terms were found within posts
related to technology and more academic terms were found within posts about participants’
academic life, the topics ofgossip, humor, movies and songs, family and intimacy and travelling
elicited a variety of switched terms from all four semantic categories. An interesting pattern was
observed in relation to that the posts within the topic of humor which did not include any
religious terms. In addition, the participants infrequently switched to either English or Arabic
within the topic of religion and when they switched the most frequently inserted Arabic words
within English sentences were religious terms. Only four posts about religion included English-
Arabic code-switching and the rest of the religious posts were written completely in Arabic as
was shown in the results.
These trends in the data can be explained by the fact that the participants wereall
Muslims who held their religion in high respect. That is why they used Arabic when making
references to the Qur’an or citing verses or prayers. It is not by chance that no religious terms
were found in the English language, but all religious terms were in Arabic within English matrix
sentences. Even when their posts were on topics different from religion, the participants switched
to Arabic to make a religious comment. These patterns in the data support the results of Al-
Khatib and Sabbah (2008) who have observed that English-Arabic code-switching occurs for
religious references. Specifically, in their study participants used religious terms within English
sentencesin text messages such as Islamic greeting, inshalla ‘God willing’, yarab ‘God willing’,
54
Allah yes3idek/yes3idak ‘May God bless you’ (p. 50), which were similar to those used by the
participants of this study in their Facebook posts.
Another interesting pattern was that the participants never used Arabic codes for
academic terms within English, instead they only used English academic codes as was shown in
Excerpt 8. This can be attributed to the fact that all of the participants were enrolled in graduate
programs either in the USA or the UK, so English was the language of their immediate
environment and of their life as graduate students. The terms they used were all common
academic terms, such as Master, PhD, dissertation, thesis, proposal, class, admission, which
were easily accessible and ready to use in comparison to their Arabic counterparts which most
probably would have taken longer time to retrieve. These observations support the results of
Al-Khatib and Sabbah (2008) who also reported that English academic terms were frequently
used in the communication of Arabic-English bilingual students.
Besides English academic terms, the other commonly inserted English words within
Arabic sentences were technical terms related to computers and the internet.This trend is most
probably not limited to Arabic-English bilinguals only. Hussein’s observation (1999, p. 288) that
“English has been acknowledged world wide as the language of science and technology” holds
true for speakers of English of other L1s too. English technical terms have become a global code
that has almost replaced the need for equivalents in the speakers’ first languages. Said,
Waschauer and Zohry (2007) have also noted that the main reason for code-switching to English
in such cases is the lack of equivalent words in Arabic.
An emerging observation, outside the research agenda of this study, was that when
monolingual Arabic Facebook friends were interested in the posts of the 10 participants, they
would ask them to translate their posts in Arabic. This was the case in the excerpt 7, where MG
55
wrote in English and switched to Arabic in her second comment responding to the non-
participant who asked her to translate her post in Arabic. This result is interesting because it
shows what happens in the larger circle of Facebook friends, where not everyone is bilingual. It
is an issue that should be explored in further research, especially in view of the observations
made by Axelsson, Abelin, and Schroeder (2003) who reported that non-native English speakers
often switched to English even in settings where the majority of the users were non-English
speaking.
Another characteristic of the Facebook posts made by the 10 bilingual friends was the use
of ASCII-ized Arabic codes. The results of the present study support Palfreyman and Al Khalil’s
results (2007)in instant messaging by university students in the United Arab Emirates. The
instances of ASCII-ized Arabic in the present study were similar to the ASCII-ized Arabic codes
used by the participants in Palfreyman and Al Khalil’s study, such as -3-/ȥ/, -7-/Ƕ/and -7’-
/x/.According to Palfreyman and Al Khalil , the use of ASCII-ized Arabic codes is due to the
lack of such symbols in the Arabic writing system.
5.2. Limitations and Recommendations
Although the results of the research support other research findings (e.g. Axelsson,
Abelin, and Schroeder (2003), Said, Waschauer and Zohry (2007), Sukyadi, Wirza, and Hasiani
(2012) and Taştan (2012), the findings cannot been entirely generalized since the present study
was delimited to a small group of Facebook friends who were also the researchers’ friends. This
can be a problem according to Gullberg, Indefreyand Muysken (2009) who claim that the
presence of the researcher causes researcher bias and participants’ reactivity effect. Hence,
despite the fact that the researcher collected the data over a long period of time in order to avoid
this problem, it still is a potential threat to the validity of the results.

56
In addition, the interpretations of the data were made entirely by the researcher and
could be subjective since the researcher did not interview the participants in order to find the
reasons behind the participants’ employment of code-switching. Therefore, further studies should
consider conducting face-to-face and/or internet-based interviews with the participants in order
to provider deeper understanding of the reasons and motivations for code-switching, especially
in relation to the topic of the posts.
In addition, this study was delimited to female Arabic-English bilingual Facebook friends
only. It will be interesting to have a similar study with male Arabic-English Facebook friends in
order to find to what extent the findings of the present study can be generalized to both genders.
Some questions that immediately come to mind are whether the frequency of code-switching will
be similar, whether the topics of the posts would be similar, and whether similar patterns of
switching would be observed.
These questions can also be investigated with speakers of English of other L1s, in female
Facebook interactions, in male Facebook interactions, and in mixed-gender interactions.
Definitely, the opportunities for research are endless given the fact that Facebook and other
social networks are still a new medium for socio-linguistic researchers.
Finally, it is important to recognize the fuzzy nature of the topic categories which were
identified based on the actual data. For this reason, the 10 topic categories are sample specific
and should not be generalized to Social network interactions in general. It is obviously an area
that is problematic, not only in the context of this study, but also in previous related studies. This
why, comparisons between studies are difficult and often inappropriate.
5.3. Conclusions
Finally, this section summarizes the main conclusions of this study:

57
First, the results reveal that intrasentential code-switching is a fact in Facebook
communication. Instances of code-switching among Arabic-English bilingual female friends
were more common than solely Arabic or solely English exchanges. In addition,
Arabic-English intrasentential code-switching was more dominant than English-Arabic code-
switching among Saudi female speakers in Facebook comments. These findings show that code-
switching as a previously defined phenomenon of face-to-face informal interactions has now
become present on social network communication sites, of which Facebook is just one example.
The implication of this is that internet and technology mediated communications offer a whole
new dimension to the field of socio-linguistic research of which code-switching is only one small
phenomenon.
Second, this study’s result show that the use of code-switching is not only related to the
social distance between the interlocutors (Goldbarg, 2009), but also to the topic of the
communication. In the case of this study, the topics of gossip and humor elicited the most use of
code-switching, however in other situations and with other participants, it can be expected that
other topics maybea more favorable ground for code-switching.
Third, the qualitative results showeda close link between the types of terms switched and
the cultural experiences and religious values of the participants. The influence of cultural
experiences was observed in the predominant use of academic English words and English
technical terms within Arabic matrix sentences, due to the fact that all 10 participants were
graduate students in at US or UK universities. The religious influence was revealed in the fact
that all religious references were made in Arabic, even when the matrix sentences were in
English.
58
Overall, this study shows that the use of intrasentential code-switching among Arabic-
English female friends on the social network Facebook is a natural part of their interactions,
which is related -- most probably subconsciously for the interlocutors -- to the topic of their
communication, their language environment, their cultural experiences, and their religion.
59
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63
VITA
Graduate School
Southern Illinois University
Saeeda, H. Alfaifi
shalfaifi@siu.edu
salfaifi2009@gmail.com
saeeda10@yahoo.com

Bachelor of Art, King Khalid University, June 2007
Thesis Title:
Code Switching Among Bilingual Saudis on Facebook
Major Professor: Krassimira Charkova

20code-Switching Among Bilingual Saudis On Facebook

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CODE-SWITCHING AMONG BILINGUAL SAUDIS ON FACEBOOK

B.A., King Khalid University, 2007

All rights reserved

INFORMATION TO ALL USERS

CODE-SWITCHING AMONG BILINGUAL SAUDIS ON FACEBOOK

A Thesis Submitted in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

in the field of Applied Linguistics

Krassimira Charkova, Chair

TITLECODE-SWITCHING AMONG BILINGUAL SAUDIS ON FACEBOOK

MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Krassimira Charkova

This study investigated the use of intrasentential code-switching on Facebook.

code-switching occurs frequently in informal Facebook interactions.

Further, the occurrence of code-switching was analyzed in relation to 10 topics of

Facebook interactions, including gossip, humor, technology, compliments and thanking,

power to believe in myself and to reach my goals and dreams.

Thank you very much for everything.

Halliday for their guidance and help in this thesis.

enthusiastic support to pursue my graduate study. My dearest parents, I am very proud of

you and I hope I can make you proud of me.

My appreciation also goes to my friend, Metro Armstrong, for proofreading my

LIST OF TABLES .........................................................................................................iv

LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................vi

CHAPTER 2 – Literature Review ..................................................................... 6

CHAPTER 3 – Methodology ............................................................................ 18

CHAPTER 5 – Discussion, Conclusion, Recommendation ............................. 50

about this sociolinguistic term.

Woolard (2005) broadly defines code-switching as a linguistic phenomenon in which an

Gardner-Chloros (2009) defines code-switching as a phenomenon observed in bilingual

motivate bilinguals to switch from one variety to another (Wardhaugh, 2010).

Myers-Scotton (1993) examined code-switching in terms of grammatical analysis. There are

three types: intersentential, intrasentential and tag switching. Intersentential code-switching

occurs within sentence boundaries. Example 1 illustrates this type of code-switching.

Spanish.(Poplack, 1980, p. 594).

The tag here is Serbian for “you know”

In reference to intersentential code-switching, Myers-Scotton (1993) observed that the

languages remain relatively separated, as shown by example 4 (Swahili-English).

Example 4: “That’s too much. Sinapesa”.

“… I don’t have [much] money.” (Myers-Scotton, 1993, p.41)

language” (Muysken, 2000, p. 135). This type is illustrated by example 5 (Dutch-Sranan).

Example 5: Wan heri geedlte de ondro beheer fu gewapendemachten” (Muysken, 2000, p.

One whole part Cop under control of armed force

“One whole part is under control of the armed forces"

language. An example of Persian-Swedishis illustrated by example 6.

Example 6: Xob pas false-an pesa-ä(Liu, 2008, p. 7)

Well then false-COP3PL boy-PL

“ Well then boys are false”

In addition, code-switching is explained in terms of sociolinguistic perspectives. Thus,

analyzing the use of intrasentential code-switching among female Arabic-English bilingual

1.2. Facebook as a Medium of Communication

only on the phenomenon of code-switching in Facebook interactions among bilingual Saudi

English female friends.

1.3. Features of Internet Arabic language

computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Crystal, 2001). Palfreyman and Al Khalil(2007)

alphabet instead of the Arabic in instant messaging (IM).

Figure 1.Example of ASCII-ized Arabic in Instant Messaging1

ized Arabic among bilingual Saudi English female friends in Facebook.

2.1. Code-switching in Online Communication

written code-switching, particularly in online communication. For example, Montes-Alcala`

Montes-Alcala` (2007) investigated why and when bilinguals code-switched in blogs. He

Anglo worlds” (p. 169).

language function for bloggers to construct different identities and relationships?