Impact of gender on frequency of code-switching in Snapchat advertisements

Abstract

Although the phenomenon of code-switching has been a subject of interest to sociolinguists since the 1970s, to date, little research has been conducted on the impact of gender on the frequency of code-switching, especially in oral communication. The current study is an attempt to bridge this gap by comparing code-switching instances in Snapchat advertisements made by 40 Saudi influencers (20 males and 20 females) who roughly belong to the same age group. The first 100 words made by each advertiser were included in the 4,000-word corpus. Although the female sample produced more instances of code-switching (n = 60) than males (n = 42), the hypothesis that there is a significant difference between males and females in the frequency of code-switching was rejected because the difference was not statistically significant either in the number of instances (p value = 0.116) or in the number of English words (p value = 0.149).

Keywords

• code-switching
• gender
• advertisement
• snapchat
• social media