Reasons of Code-Mixing on BlackBerry Messenger
Tjong, Stefani Kristiana Chandra
ABSTRACT
Recently, BlackBerry Messenger has become one of popular media and instant messaging. By using BBM, participants can express feelings and thoughts thorough the facility of personal message (status). Code mixing, the alternation of two or more languages, is the phenomenon that happened in social networking nowadays. The aim of the study is to investigate reasons of using code mixing on BBM status. There were 20 BBM statuses written by 10 participants of Satya Wacana Christian University students in English Language Education as the data. The researcher observed the recent update to find code mixing status and directly did an interview through BBM chatting with certain participants. Malik’s theory (1994) on 10 reasons of code mixing was used to analyze participants’ answer in the interview. The result indicated that code mixing can also occur in written language, especially in instant messaging. The reasons were: habitual expression, to show identity with group, pragmatic reasons, lack of facility, to amplify and emphasize a point, and lack of registrar competence. There were also other findings outside the theory, such as prestige, imitating friend’s words and games, spontaneous, and simpler sentence. In future research, the analysis of code mixing reasons can be observed in a larger number of participants with different gender and background. It is also suggested to do a research with other instant messaging or social media.
