Motivations for code switching among Fulfulde speakers within Yola south local government area, Adamawa State.

Abstract

The practice of code-switching today has become a common act in a multilingual and bilingual societies. This research attempts to investigate the possible social factors and motivations that triggers Fulfulde speakers to change from their native to English language in a conversation. In addition, it is observed that the established relationship with other languages has tremendously contributed to the high practice of code-switching in most societies. Also, demographic and social factors such as gender, age, educational background, advent of science and technology, exposure and socialization with other languages among others trigger speakers to switch languages. Moreover, the study finds that most Fulfulde speakers switch languages because of reasons like; laying emphasis, quoting somebody else, reporting event as it occurred, etc. observations also show that code-switching happens naturally among speakers, it does not follow any of the strict linguistic patterns.