Published Paper Details:

This paper is a comprehensive analysis of code alternation by Yoruba-English bilinguals on the Internet. Specifically, the study investigates the communicative functions of computer-mediated code-switching among Yoruba-English bilinguals on WhatsApp (A chatting application owned by Facebook Incorporated). Code is a �neutral� (as against language, dialect, sociolect and idiolect) term that can be used to refer to any kind of system that two or more people employ for communication. Therefore, code alternation is one of the sociolinguistic approaches to language change in any bilingual community (either the physical/real life community or the cyberspace). Consequently, code-switching is a by-product of code alternation. Code-switching is an important aspect of bilingual discourse and it is seen as performing five communicative functions as evident in the data collected for this study. The functions include the following: a referential function, a directive function, an expressive function, a phatic function and a metalinguistic function. Our findings revealed that the interlocutors on WhatsApp exhibit through their use of language to perform these communicative functions that human interaction takes place within a cooperative activity which is the domain of �Systemic Functional Theory�.