Motivation of Code-switching by Arabic-English Bilinguals in Social Media Influencers’ Short Videos

Whether consciously or unconsciously, the social media influencers use code-switching, a phenomenon which has become very popular and widespread nowadays. This research investigates the use of code-switching by Egyptian social media Influencers attempting to cover the types, reasons/motivations, and the functions of code-switching. The subjects of this research are a famous Egyptian blogger and an online English teacher who mix English with Arabic to deliver their meaning. The study is qualitative in nature since it requires description of code switching based on the data collected that show instances of code switching. Furthermore, the data are three short videos focusing on the utterances where the code-switching is unavoidably employed as a means of social communication. The results reveal that three types of code-switching have been used by the English instructors: intersentential, intrasentential and tag switching, whereas the intrasentential type is the most used by both the blogger and the English language instructor; social media influencers. Furthermore, the two most dominant factors that make Egyptian social media influencers generally code-switch are the facility of retrieving words from the memory and the situational factor.