Kurdish and Arabic in Contact: Code-Switching among Kurds in Mosul/Iraq

Abstract

This study investigates a recent sociolinguistic phenomenon (i.e., Arabic–Kurdish Code-Switching (henceforth K-Ar CS). This study attempts to tackle the linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints of Kurdish-Arabic code-switching among the Kurds in Mosul/Iraq. The linguistic constraints of this phenomenon, which is common in bilingual and multilingual speech communities, imply that mixing two languages does not represent a random blending; on the contrary, CS is systematic and follows certain linguistic rules which can be divided into two categories: linguistic and extra-linguistic (i.e., psychological, sociological and academic)1.