Code Switching in Selected Catholic Bishops’ Lenten Pastoral Letters in the Ecclesiastical Province of Onitsha, Nigeria

Language serves its users both as a means of communication and as an index of their culture and identity. The speaker not only communicates his ideas but also expresses his belonging to a group. Sometimes, this comes naturally and sometimes intentionally to achieve a particular purpose in a discourse. Catholic bishops in the Ecclesiastical Province of Onitsha have prominently employed code switching in their pastoral letters. The objective of this paper is to examine the bishops’ deployment of code switching in the letters with the aim of determining its discourse functions. The study is based on Howard Giles’ Communication Accommodation Theory in combination with Aristotle’s theory of persuasion, with particular emphasis on pathos and ethos. Data are obtained from selected pastoral letters ranging between 20 and 104 pages and published between 2000 and 2010 by the Catholic bishops in the ecclesiastical province of Onitsha, Nigeria. These are subjected to discourse analysis, which reveals that the bishops have deployed code switching from English to Igbo in order to accommodate to the audience to achieve solidarity and enlist their support, and from English to Latin in order to show off learning, maintain social status and present themselves positively to elicit admiration, all for the ultimate purpose of persuading the faithful to comply with their messages.