Cross-linguistic Variation Among Selected Yoruba-English Bilinguals

This study examined cross-linguistic variation in relation to a gripping pattern of code-mixing observed in the speech of some Yorùbá-English speakers. It employed a descriptive-qualitative design and analysed 157 sentences of selected Yorùbá-English bilinguals from different age groups in Osun and Oyo States. The findings revealed that English words, viewed from the English grammatical perspective, now assume new roles in Yorùbá utterances. However, the new roles reflect the grammatical composition of the Yorùbá language. This means that English words are used to adapt to the grammatical rules of the Yorùbá language. In light of this, a word that functions as a verb or as an adjective in English is found to function as a noun or an adverb in Yorùbá. It is observed that the use of English words in Yorùbá utterances by some Yorùbá language speakers is traceable to the internal linguistic constraints imposed by the structure of Yorùbá. The import of this is that a word from a donor language may function in a different lexical category in a recipient or target language.