Arabic-English Code-Switching among KKU Students on Social Media “Twitter”

Code-switching is one of the apparent linguistic phenomena in bilingual or multilingual communication. This study investigated the occurrence of CS between Arabic and English languages among KKU students on social media, particularly Twitter. It sought to find out the frequent types and reasons for CS that appeared on KKU students’ Twitter accounts. The study was conducted using quantitative and qualitative methods. The primary data of this study was collected to explore the occurrence and the types of CS by taking screenshots of 300 tweets from Twitter accounts of 20 KKU students. The secondary data of this study was responses to an online questionnaire in order to examine the reasons for CS. The findings of this study proved that Arabic-English CS occurred among KKU students on Twitter. Also, it showed that the most frequent type of CS was intra-sentential CS. In addition, it was found that the most frequent reason that motivated KKU students to CS was the reason for talking about a particular topic. The current study provided significant information about using CS among KKU students on Twitter. It also encouraged to conduct further researches in this field, especially among Arab universities.