The Nature and Function of Code-Switching Amongst Students of Higher Institutions in Adamawa State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study examines the nature and function of code-switching among students in higher institutions of learning in Adamawa State, Nigeria, a linguistically diverse region where English, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin, and indigenous languages interact in daily communication. Guided by two research questions concerning the predominant structural patterns of code-switching and the primary communicative and social functions it serves, and how both vary according to participants' linguistic backgrounds, the study is anchored in Poplack's (1980) structural typology and Gumperz's (1982) interactional sociolinguistic framework. It adopts a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, combining qualitative data from interviews with 60 students and 30 lecturers, focus group discussions, and classroom observations with quantitative data from a Likert-scale questionnaire administered to 600 students across six higher institutions representing Adamawa State's three geopolitical zones. Analysis of 1,247 recorded code-switching instances shows that intra-sentential switching is the most frequent structural type (49.1%), followed by inter-sentential switching (39.9%) and tag-switching (11.0%), with English-Hausa alternation predominating and nouns and verbs constituting the most frequently switched syntactic categories. Functionally, code-switching serves seven identifiable purposes, most prominently pedagogical scaffolding, social solidarity, and affective expression, indicating that students deploy it as a deliberate communicative strategy rather than a marker of linguistic deficiency. These findings extend structural and functional models of code-switching to the underexplored north-eastern Nigerian context.