LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF CODE MIXING AND CODE-SWITCHING AMONG THE EDUCATED IGBO BILINGUALS

Uduma, Eke O.

Department of English

Joseph Ayo Babalola University, Ikeji-Arakeji, Osun-State, Nigeria

Email Address: eminentrefound@yahoo.co.uk

ABSTRACT

English as the official language in Nigeria has continued to play diverse roles. It is the language of education, government, administration, commerce, journalism, legislative and international deliberations; it lives alongside other Nigerian languages, interacts with them and adapts itself to the Nigerian environment. This interaction with Nigerian languages; Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba led to pidginization, nativization and acculturation of English. Igbo language and culture has also influenced the English language. The thrust of this paper is examination of speech behavior of the educated Igbo -bilinguals who may not be able to speak Igbo language without code switching or mixing of English language. This paper used texts of interviews and responses to questionnaire administered in previous works. It examined corpuses to identify linguistic features of code-switching in the speech behavior of the educated Igbo bilinguals. It analyzed the simple sentences and WH-clause structures of Engligbo using Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar Theory.

Keywords: Educated-Igbo bilinguals, nativization, Igbo language and Engligbo.