Lexical Borrowing and Code-switching in the Spoken Language of Egyptian Youth: A Sociolinguistic Study

Abstract

Due to globalization and the rapid development of technology (such as the Internet), no one can deny the impact of technology on language represented in two linguistic phenomena: lexical borrowing and code-switching. The study aims to describe these two phenomena and correlates these results with relevant social factors. The widespread view is that the language of youth on the internet threatens the Arabic spoken language, as they use a mixture of English and Arabic. Therefore, this study seeks to investigate language attitudes of youth aged 18-30 in order to find out whether the Arabic language is being abandoned or not and why. The results and findings of the study show that although English is the official language of the internet, yet it is found that Arabic is the dominant language in the Internet as Egyptian youth prefer to use Arabic in their communication. Therefore, it is to be concluded that the Arabic language is not abandoned.