This paper centers on the social motivations factors that determine the Matrix Language Concept in Code Switching within the social contact of language in a multilingual society, that is, Mwea East Sub-County, Kirinyaga County Kenya where eight languages are spoken. Information for the survey was collected using questionnaire sets distributed to 300 multilingual participants, who completed them. Audio tapes were also used to describe the patterns and the Linguistic motivation of CS phenomena in language varieties. The data were examined within the sketch of Myers-Scotton’s Markedness Model that deals with social motivations for Code Switching. The result of the investigation established that alternating between two languages is a discourse strategy use by bilinguals and multilinguals to communicate effectively, which is mostly influenced by certain social variables and morphosyntactic structures of the languages. This study hopes to provide insights on the code-switching phenomenon in a multilingual society. Additionally, the findings of this study will be of value for the development of code-switching studies in the sociolinguistic area.
Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
