Field and river

20th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (ICES20)
Mekelle University, Ethiopia

"Regional and Global Ethiopia - Interconnections and Identities"
1-5 October, 2018

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LANGUAGE CONTACT AND CODE-SWITCHING : THE SOMALI LANGUAGE IN DJIBOUTI [Abstract ID: 0812-05]

Hawa ABDILLAHI FARAH, Aix-Marseille University

Djibouti presents a complex configuration of its sociolinguistic situation with the presence of several languages. To understand the language mixing in Djibouti, Somali is one of the country's national languages ​​alongside Afar and also refers to the Somali community as Afar. The official languages ​​in Djibouti are French and literary Arabic. In addition to these four languages, there are the Arabic dialects (hakmi and souki) that are spoken by the Djibouti Arabs. Finally, we find in Djibouti the foreign languages ​​such as English (taught as a foreign language), Amharic (which is growing thanks to trade between Djibouti and Ethiopia). Djiboutian speakers have a linguistic practice that imprints many linguistic phenomena that result from the use of several languages. There is not much work on Somali linguistics spoken in Djibouti. On the other hand, the variety of Somali spoken in Djibouti in contact with the other languages ​​has never been studied until now and at least Code-Switching and all the other linguistic changes. The Code-Switching is a mixture of two or more codes or languages ​​by a bilingual or a multilingual in the same speech with the same interlocutor on the same subject. The purpose of this paper is to describe intrasentential, intersentential and extrasentential code-switching through Somali spoken by bilingual Djiboutians (Somali and French). To do this work, MEYER SCOTTON's Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (1993) and the syntax constraints of POPLACK (1981) will be used to explain the different forms of code alternation. And, our corpus will be two episodes of a television show (broadcast on May 23, 2016 and November 7, 2016 and entitled "qalinka iyo aqoonta") presented in Somali.