A Broadcast Code Switching Framework: English-Swahili Alternation in Kenyan Local Radio and the Limits of Conversational Models

The dominant frameworks for analysing code switching — Gumperz's conversational functions model, Myers-Scotton's Markedness Model, and Auer's sequential approach — were each developed through the analysis of face-to-face interaction. When applied individually to broadcast code switching, they produce incomplete analyses because they depend on interactional conditions that radio speech does not satisfy: a singular, co-present interlocutor; real-time feedback; and a stable unmarked code shared between speaker and hearer. English-Swahili code switching in Kenyan local radio violates all three conditions at once, and analyses that extend conversational frameworks to the broadcast context without accounting for these violations risk misreading both the functions and the motivations of language alternation in that context. This paper proposes a Broadcast Code Switching Framework (BCSF) that draws the three conversational models together into a single analytical instrument calibrated to the conditions of radio broadcasting. The BCSF organises its analysis around three interacting dimensions — the audience-structural, the indexical, and the ideological — and argues that a complete account of English-Swahili alternation in Kenyan radio cannot be produced from any one of them alone. The paper concludes that broadcast code switching is a theoretically distinct phenomenon from conversational code switching, with implications for sociolinguistic theory and for language policy in multilingual broadcasting contexts.