Investigating Linguistic Boundaries: The Impact of English-Arabic Code-Mixing Among Psychology Students in Egypt

Code-mixing occurs when speakers alternate between two or more languages within a single utterance, and it is used in different social contexts such as academic, media, and daily conversations. Given the paucity of studies conducted on code-mixing phenomenon at the university level in Egypt, the current study aims to examine the perception of phycology Department students toward English-Arabic code-mixing at a private university in Egypt. The participants of the study were 70 Egyptian female and male students that aged from 17-23 years old. A survey of 18 questions was distributed to the participants. The qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect data. Research findings demonstrated that code-mixing helped students to express their emotions clearly without feeling anxious or embarrassed about speaking with their addressees within different social contexts, and most of the students showed a positive attitude toward code-mixing. During informal or casual conversations with others, code-mixing served as a language that each one used to represent their identity. In academic contexts, students were encouraged to code-mix in lectures, which helps them to join more discussions during the lecture and to express complex concepts easily without feeling anxious. While, other students used code-mixing strategy to express some specific technical expressions that are culturally refined with their native language. As for the current results, they provide a valuable insight for further research, which suggests to distribute the survey across all faculties or piloted to other universities to understand more about the attitudes and perceptions of students toward code-mixing at university level in Egypt. Thus, code-mixing is not a direct form of language, but it is an important communicative strategy that is used in different communities. The importance of the current study stems from its sociolinguistic approach to cover a distinct gap in code-mixing, based on previous studies.