Sacred Words, Mixed Tongues: Yoruba-English Code-Switching as a Stylistic Resource in Contemporary Yoruba Praise-and-Worship Music

This study examines Yoruba-English code-switching as a stylistic and pragmatic resource in contemporary Yoruba praise-and-worship music. Contemporary gospel music remains comparatively under-examined as a site of bilingual aesthetic and theological practice relative to classical Yoruba oral genres. Drawing on foregrounding theory and Myers-Scotton’s (1993) Markedness Model, the analysis classifies numbered excerpts drawn from eight purposively selected and fully transcribed songs, four by Tope Alabi and four by Adeyinka Alaseyori, according to structural form, textual position, and discourse function. The findings indicate that code-switching is concentrated at rhetorically prominent points, including refrains, testimonial passages, direct invocations, and climactic repetitions, rather than being evenly distributed throughout the lyrics. The songs display two broad compositional tendencies: English-anchored hooks set against Yoruba-dominant verses or ad-libs, and Yoruba-anchored refrains containing selective English insertions. English expressions in the Yoruba-dense song Arojinle cluster around themes of survival, mortality, divine intervention, and public testimony. The study argues that Yoruba-English code-switching in the selected corpus is a patterned stylistic practice through which gospel performers negotiate congregational participation, intimacy, indigenous theological specificity, and wider Christian intelligibility. The conclusions are corpus-specific and illustrative rather than statistically generalisable.