GRAMMATICALITY AND CODE-SWITCHING IN THE IGBO LANGUAGE: CODE-SWITCHING IN IGBO-ENGLISH, IGBO-GERMAN AND IGBO-ENGLISH-GERMAN

Abstract

Language defines humans because of our essential social connectedness, properly captured by Martin Heidegger (1967) in the idea of “Being-with-others” (Mitsein) in his famous book “Sein und Zeit” (translated in English as “Being and Time” ). Human beings are also capable of acquiring many languages. The more the cultures they interact with, the more languages they are likely to learn and also achieve competence and fluency in. Language users who are bilingual or multilingual tend to switch codes, especially in their informal speeches and writings. Many scholars have studied and written on code-switching or code-mixing as a linguistic or sociolinguistic phenomenon. The approach of these scholars, in contradistinction from ours, is the classification of code-mixed elements as words, phrases, and sentences (intra- and extra-sentential code-switching). Our approach is to examine the grammaticality of the English and German elements in the code-mixed sentences. Our research has revealed that Igbo code-switchers often use grammatically incorrect English or German sentences in their code-switching conversations.