Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures Vol.13, No. 3, 2021, pp 477-499 477 JJMLL Ne * Code-Switching to English amongst Arabic-speaking Jordanians in Canada * Zeyad Yousef Al-Daher* Department of English language and literature, Al-Balqa Applied University, Jordan Received on: 29-6-2020 Accepted on: 5-10-2020 Abstract Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which refers to bilinguals’ utilization of two languages in the same conversation and even within a single utterance. This study investigates Arabic-English code-switching among Jordanian immigrants in Manitoba, Canada and presents a qualitative analysis of the socio-pragmatic functions this linguistic behavior serves. The participants were 11 (3 females and 8 males) Jordanian immigrants living in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba. Two instruments were employed to elicit the data necessary for this study: audio recordings and semi-structured interviews. The code-switching occurrences were categorized into different socio-pragmatic functions based on the analysis of the content of almost 18 hours of recorded conversations. The analysis of the content of the audio-recordings besides the semi-structured interviews showed that Jordanian immigrants resort to code-switching to achieve a number of socio- pragmatic functions: filling lexical needs, integrating into the Canadian culture and lifestyle, qualifying a message, mitigating embarrassment and negative connotations, quoting the exact words of somebody, and creating humorous or ironic effect. Keywords: Code-Switching; Socio-Pragmatic Functions; Canada; Arabic; English. 1. Introduction Code-switching is a key characteristic of bilinguals’ everyday interactions, especially when they live in a language contact setting. Most researchers view code-switching as a matter of alternation between two or more languages by the same bilingual speaker in the same conversation, often within the same utterance, and usually with no change of the addressee or subject (see, e.g., Gumperz 1982; Grosjean 1982; Myers-Scotton 1993; Milroy and Muysken 1995; Hamers and Blanc 2000; Thomason 2001; Brown and Attardo 2005; Bullock and Toribio 2009). The phenomenon of code-switching has been approached syntactically (Pfaff 1976 and 1979; Poplack 1980; Sankoff and Poplack 1980), sociolinguistically (Blom and Gumperz 1972; MacNamara et al. 1975; Gumperz 1976 and 1982; Kanakri and Ionescu 2010; Chughtai and Khan 2016) and psycholinguistically (e.g., Sridhar and Sridhar 1980; Grosjean 1995; Dussias 2001; Karousou-Fokas and Garman 2001).  2021 JJMLL Publishers/Yarmouk University. All Rights Reserved, * Doi: https://doi.org/ 10.47012/jjmll.13.3.7 * Corresponding Author: aldaherz@bau.edu.jo