Codeswitching Among Arabic-English Bilingual Children: An Autoethnographic Case Study in Dubai

Abstract

In the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns, educators experienced significant shifts in teaching and learning paradigms. This unique context provided an opportunity for original empirical research utilizing autoethnography. Drawing upon her roles as an educator and mother of three, the lead researcher had the advantage during the lockdown to closely observe her children's conversations and interactions. This micro-level observation revealed the intriguing phenomenon of code-switching (CS) between Arabic and English within their utterances. Inspired by this linguistic phenomenon, the lead researcher conducted an autoethnographic case study to explore and understand this phenomenon further. By employing a sociolinguistic approach, the study aims to describe the frequency, types, and functions of CS utilized by her three bilingual children. The research is guided by Poplack's Grammatical Theory, which analyzes CS at the sentence level, and Gumperz's theory of situational and metaphorical CS, video recordings of the boys' utterances, and the researcher's fieldnotes form the data corpus, which is analyzed using the Transana Software. This autoethnographic study contributes to the field of Arab sociolinguistics by employing a unique methodology and embracing the perspective of the ‘motherscholar.’ The research addresses a gap in the literature, as there is a dearth of studies investigating CS among expatriate Arab children living in the Gulf context, particularly from an autoethnographic lens. The findings of this study shed light on the CS practices of bilingual children in Dubai and provide insights into the linguistic and social significance of CS in language contact situations. Moreover, this research has the potential to encourage further explorations into CS among other expatriate children in Dubai and other Emirates, contributing to a more comprehensive understating of bilingualism, language contact, and sociolinguistics in the Arab region.