What Is Code Switching?

“What is worrisome is not that we have all learned to think in English, but that our education devalues our cultures, that we are not taught to write Igbo and that middle-class parents don’t much care that their children do not speak their native language or have a sense of their history.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2016

English has become the universal language in our 21st century and has thus come to assume a unilateral power over the discourses it has colonised. However, the importance of the African language and culture is not lost and there is a popular belief that African writers must respond and bend the English language to such an extent that their thoughts appear cogent in a text and that their words become theirs, not their colonisers.
It is important to note, however, that the English spoken in Nigeria has been adapted and indigenized within the different groups present. This is especially evident through the use of code switching or code mixing in the novel. As Carol Meyers-Scotton defines it, code-switching (used as a parlance for both “code switching” and “code mixing”) is “the use of two or more linguistic varieties in the same conversation. It can be intra- or extra-sentential and also intra-word.” (1993, p. 85) Code switching can be seen as either a familiarizing or a distancing device; in this case it is used by Adichie’s as a means to sincerely represent Nigerian culture as well as an attempt to communicate effectively with her
“His agbada was embroidered with gold thread around the collar.” (p. 33) The ‘agbada’ refers to Nigeria as multilingual and means local embroidery worn by chiefs in Nigeria (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary) The second example, “Clusters of girls were closer to the road, playing oga and swell, clapping rhythmically as they hopped first on one leg and then the other.” (p. 38) references a local game (“oga and swell” usually played by young Igbo girls. The term was probably kept in Igbo because there is no English correspondent, but also because it shows that Adichie’s culture has more power in her choice of words than anything else. Adichie gains power as she has a wider choice of words across different languages, giving her the advantage of being able to elevate the book in the language that she uses. In choosing how she wishes to communicate, Adichie reasserts her power when in her writing. Although there are English equivalents to many of the indigenous words used, Adichie still writes in her own language, indicating that ethnic languages do not have to take the backseat when it comes to