Code-mixing English and Sheng Into Kiswahili Utterances: a Case Study of Pastor T’s Sermons

Abstract

This study examined the linguistic nature of code-mixing in Pastor T’s sermons. It sought to determine the dominant language of utterances in Pastor T’s sermons, identify the intraword mixed constituents and evaluate their well-formedness, and lastly establish the acceptability of code-mixed utterances which contained intraword mixed constructions. It sought to answer the following questions: can English or Sheng become dominant in the code-mixed utterances, are there intraword mixed contituents for both language pairs in the utterances, how well-formed are these intraword mixed constituents in the code-mixed utterances and finally what is the acceptability of these utterances that contain intraword mixed constructions to participants who are proficient in the three languages. The data came from three of Pastor T’s sermons. These sermons were transcribed, annotated and utterances that contained intraword mixed constituents identified. These utterances were then subjected to a descriptive analysis based on Myer-Scotton’s MLF model. The utterances were also analysed based on word count and first word to evaluate dominance of the varieties. A questionairre was later used to determine the acceptability of the utterances containing the different language pairs. Two broad categories of mixing were identified: one that involved code-mixing English and Kiswahili and another that involved code-mixing Sheng and Kiswahili. The mixing of these language pairs included well-formed intraword mixed constituents where Sheng and Kiswahili provided grammatical inflections. Based on the models all the three languages were dominant. When the utterances were subjected to acceptability judgment tasks the participants provided mixed high and low scores for both language pairs.