ECHOES OF EMOTION: INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF AMBIENT SOUNDSCAPES ON CODE-SWITCHING PATTERNS IN MULTILINGUAL DIGITAL COMMUNICATION

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of ambient soundscapes—auditory environments such as café chatter, traffic noise, and natural soundscapes—on code-switching behaviors within multilingual digital communication. Despite the rich body of literature on code-switching in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), little attention has been paid to the affective and cognitive implications of the user's immediate auditory surroundings. Drawing upon interdisciplinary frameworks from sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and auditory cognition, this research posits that ambient soundscapes function as emotionally and cognitively charged contexts that modulate not only the frequency but also the pragmatic function of code-switching during digital text-based interaction. Using a convergent mixed-methods design, the study combines controlled laboratory-based digital chat experiments under three auditory conditions (silence, urban noise, and natural soundscapes), corpus-driven discourse analysis of real-world multilingual chats from platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, and in-depth post-task interviews to capture participants’ conscious and subconscious linguistic adaptations. Preliminary findings suggest that soundscapes with higher cognitive load (e.g., urban noise) significantly increase both the rate and strategic deployment of code-switching for emphasis, clarification, and emotional resonance, whereas nature-based soundscapes support greater linguistic cohesion and intra-language continuity. By foregrounding the acoustic ecology of digital communication, this research introduces an underexplored but critical dimension to understanding multilingualism in the digital age. It also offers actionable implications for the design of emotionally aware and context-responsive communication technologies, particularly in increasingly globalized and sonically dynamic interaction spaces.