Structural Patterns of Multilingual Codeswitching between Arabic and English

As multilingualism is increasingly embraced in Saudi Arabia, the inevitable practice ofcodeswitching is a topic of heated debate. While it has been the subject of strong-held beliefsand opinions, established scholarly work is needed to enlighten the understanding of this useof languages. Hence, this study explored naturally occurring data of the codeswitching use ofArabic and English by multilingual Arab students as they attend Arabic weekly cultural seminarsessions during their temporary stay and study in the US. It captures their codeswitching use viavideo recordings and subjected to linguistic analyses on three levels: whole text-level, sentenceleveland morpheme-level, with the implementation of the mixed-method approach. The findingsrevealed that the linguistic analysis of 523 codeswitching occurrences found in the data revealedthe structural complexity and variety of codeswitching as a linguistic resource available tomultilinguals fluent in Arabic and English. Occurring spontaneously and rather unpredictablyin multilingual interactions, it disproved common Saudi and other perceptions of it as a form oflanguage offense and careless linguistic behavior.