Abstract

As a literary text, Barclays Ayakoroma’s Castles in the Air suffers a dearth of critical insights and exploration from a linguistic standpoint, which is vital for a comprehensive description and characterization of the text. Using M.A.K. Halliday’s systemic functional model, particularly the textual, ideational and interpersonal metafunctions, the study, therefore, investigates the stylistic value of code-mixing and code-switching in the text, with particular focus on the sociology of language in a bilingual or multilingual text. The study reveals that code mixing and code switching enable interlocutors to be down-to-earth, instantiate bonding and solidarity with particular groups/classes of people, thereby excluding others, capture emotional and psychological states, and impart or emphasize specific messages or moods in given informal discourse situations. The study foregrounds the twin concepts as a cardinal part of the complex Nigerian linguistic and cultural environment which Ayakoroma deploys to nativize and contextualize meaning in the text. It demonstrates the fact that the linguistic choices of a writer are products of sundry social and contextual variables.

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