Gender and the Functional Distribution of Codeswitching in Maghreb Arabic–French–English Trilingual Interaction: An Exploratory Study

This study examines whether gender is associated with both the frequency of codeswitching (CS) and the functions that switching performs in Maghreb Arabic (MA)–French–English trilingual peer talk. Gender-focused studies of CS have more often dealt with frequency, structure, attitudes, or identity than with the communicative work of switches in naturally occurring trilingual interaction. The analysis uses three recordings from a larger corpus: one mixed-gender group, one female-only group, and one male-only group. Together, they include eight speakers (four women and four men), 13,785 words, and 745 coded functional instances classified as pragmatic, semantic, linguistic, or sociocultural. The results show that the normalized CS rates are almost the same for women and men (53.14 and 54.93 functional instances per 1000 words). Speaker-level tests and an exploratory chi-square analysis also find no association between gender and the broad functional distribution, chi-square(3, N = 745) = 0.90, p = 0.825, Cramer’s V = 0.035. Sociocultural and pragmatic functions are the most common in both groups, whereas linguistic functions are rare. The study also reveals that no gender differentiation appears in this subset. Because the sample is small, and gender overlaps with recording context, the findings are descriptive and apply only to the recordings examined.