A Comparative Study of Code Switching Pattern among Female Elementary and High-School Students in Urmia

Code switching, as an outcome of linguistic contact, can be seen in most of the multilingual societies, including Urmia, the capital city of West Azerbaijan province, Iran. The present field study aimed to compare the frequency, direction (from Turkish to Persian or vice versa), and categorical levels (affix, word, phrase, or sentence) of code switching among female elementary and high-school students representing high, middle, and low social classes. In order to do this, the required data were extracted from the casual conversations of the students which were collected using a non-participant observation method through voice recording in public places. According to the findings, code switching was more frequent among high-school students representing the middle social class. Besides, according to the results, words were the most frequent, and affixes were the rarest code-switched elements in the data. Moreover, most of the students switched the code when their mother language was the dominant language of the conversation. Also, high-school students favored code-switching at word level, compared to the elementary students who switched sentences most.