CHAPTER ONE
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Background to the Study
Akindele and Adegbite (2005) describe language as a system of sound or vocal symbols by which human communicate experience. Language plays an important role in human undertakings, it is also the association of sounds with thought, concept or images in the mind and also the ability to produce and interpret sound in recurrent pattern.
Since there is no limitation to the numbers of languages that exist in a community, the phenomenon of code switching is bound to occur which gives the language users of the speech community, the abilityto alternate between the available languages in their community. Muysken(2001:1) refers to code switching as the rapid succession of several languages in a single speech event. This definition shows that for a speaker to code switch, “several languages”must be involved which ranges from at least two languages and above, therefore, it takes a bilingual to alternate among the available languages in a speech community, while Weinreich(1953) refers to a bilingual people as those individuals that switch from one language to the other according to the appropriate changes in speech situation.
A somewhat related concept to code switching as a phenomenon in sociolinguistics is ‘code mixing’, Bentahila and Davies (1983) stress the importance of the relationship between switching and mixing of codes in a speech community by stating that the act of choosing one code rather than the other must be distinguished from the act of mixing the two codes together to produce something which might itself be called ‘a third code’, as a result of this, “code switching is the use of two languages within a single conversation, exchange or utterance”. With the relationship that exist between both mixing and switching of codes, it can be said that code mixing is the process of mixing elements from two languages in one utterance while code switching is the product of language mix.
The explanation of both phenomena of code switching and code mixing as they occur in conversation necessitates this study in exploring the manifestation of switching of codes in song lyrics with a focus on Fuji music from the selected tracks of Sikiru Ayinde Barrister. In so doing, this research is motivated by my keen curiosity to unearth the motivations, patterns and function of language alternation in a bilingual community with a close attention on the selected tracks of Fuji music, thereby, going beyond the previous studies on the investigation of switching in conversations.