LINGUISTIC CHOICES IN MULTILINGUAL SPHERES: THE CASE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GHANA MALE STUDENTS..

1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
“A multilingual situation is always of immense interest. It can produce multiple and varied impact of the society, community and the languages themselves. Just as it may yield to diverse outcomes, it also yields itself to diverse mode of examination of the situation.” Ghosh et al (2009: 1-2) Language can often be used, albeit subtly, to define a particular society and culture. One can, indeed, argue that language is both “an individual and a group possession” (Wardhaugh, 1969:91).

Consequently, linguistic choices are influenced by the kinds of roles that speech communities assign to certain languages. In countries like Ghana where several languages are available to the people engaged in communicative events, speakers constantly make decisions as to what language(s) to speak and what language(s) to avoid during interactions in certain domains. As Ferguson rightly observed, “speakers often use more than one language variety in one kind of circumstance and another variety under another condition” (Fasold, 1984: 34).

In fact, one cannot totally separate the making of language choices from the phenomenon of bi/multilingualism in that in typical monolingual situations, speakers do not as a matter of fact have to make decisions concerning what language(s) to use within certain domains. The reason is quite obvious – only one language is available to them. The situation, however, is different  in  multilingual  societies  like  Ghana,  Nigeria,  Cameroun  and  Benin  where interlocutors operating within multilingual contexts consciously decide the appropriateness or otherwise of certain language choices within specific domains. In such societies, it can be realised that interlocutors often have different languages for different purposes and the decisions to use either of those languages available to them might be influenced by age, gender, domain and the characteristics of the interactors within a particular communicative event.

In Ghana, for instance, Student Pidgin is considered a male code and is frequently used to reinforce male group identity in universities and secondary schools (Dako, 2000: 74). This implies that it cannot be used in very formal context. As a result, male students of universities and senior high schools consciously make decisions as to which language to use (Student
Pidgin, English or a Ghanaian language) when it becomes necessary to communicate with people.

Like most senior high schools and tertiary institutions in Ghana, the University of Ghana is a cosmopolitan institution with people from different ethnolinguistic background pushed into one environment. The environment is complexly multilingual with students using certain languages when they find themselves in certain situations. Cursory generalizations have been
made about language use at the University of Ghana with a few scholars like Dako (2000:74) claiming that Student Pidgin and English Language are in a diglossic relationship on university campuses.  It is in the light of this that this paper seeks to study multilingualism among male students of the University of Ghana. The study forms part of the recent investigations into the correlation between gender on one hand and multilingualism, language choices and diglossia on another hand. The focus is to determine the kinds of linguistic choices that male students of the University make when they find themselves in various
contexts on campus.