Patterns of Code-Alternation in Nigerian Advertisement Jingles on Radio and Youtube

The alternation of codes in advertisements in the multilingual Nigerian society is a linguistic practice used by advertisers to effectively disseminate the information about the advertised products and services to diverse categories of listeners. The objectives of the study are to examine the types of code-switching used in the advertisement jingles; the various patterns of code-switching and code-mixing and their frequency of occurrence in the advertisement jingles; and the implications of these patterns of code-switching and code-mixing used by the advertisers on advertisements. The primary source of data was drawn from 60 code-switched advertisement jingles collected from 30 radio commercials and 30 online advertisements on YouTube. The 30 radio jingles were collected from 12 radio stations in the Southwestern states in Nigeria which are Osun, Oyo, Ondo, Ogun, Ekiti and Lagos. The result showed that from the three types of code-switching used in the selected advertisement jingles, there were nineteen (19) different patterns of code-switching, code-mixing and tag switching used by the advertisers. There are twelve (12) patterns of inter-sentential code-switching in which the dominant pattern is the “Naija-English Code-switching, four (4) patterns of intra-sentential code-switching in which the dominant pattern is the “Yorùbá-English Code-mixing” and three (3) patterns of tag switching in which the “English-Yorùbá Tag switching” is the dominant pattern. These patterns of code-switching, code-mixing and tag switching are functional motivated language strategies used by the advertisers for various reasons which is aimed at performing some specific functions. The study concluded that the linguistic proficiency of the advertisers in unifying the Yorùbá, Naija and English languages together in the advertisement jingles has helped to enhance a successful dissemination of information about the advertised products and services to the Nigerian people which has proffered a solution to the challenge of multilingualism. The study recommends that code-alternation should be used by advertisers, marketers, manufacturers and service providers when engaging in advertising discourses especially in multilingual societies.