Reasons for the Use of CM and CS in Political Personnel’s Tweets

Abstract

Code switching and code mixing are widespread phenomena in bilingual communities where speakers use their native language (L1) and their second language (L2) in different domains. The aim of this research is to provide a complete overview over the phenomenon of code switching and code mixing. This research presents why bilingual political persons mix two languages and switch back and forth between two languages and what triggers them to mix and switch their languages when they post their tweets on Twitter. The term of code switching refers to the alternate use of two or more languages in an extended stretch of discourse, where the switch takes place at sentence or clause boundaries. As many have pointed out, the term code mixing tends to attract negative associations, giving the value loaded impression that ‘mixing’ language is symptomatic of bad or pathological language behavior. A code may be a language or a variety or style of a language; the term code mixing emphasizes hybridization and the term code switching emphasizes movement from one language to another. In this present research, reasons of code switching and code mixing of Urdu language in English tweets of political persons are investigated. Data is collected from Bilawal Bhutto’s Twitter profile. Eight tweets have been taken and then analyzed qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Analyzed data shows that among code switching and code mixing, code mixing is used frequently. Among the reasons of CS and CM, it has been found that people mostly switch or mix codes when they want to be emphatic or when they want to attract the attention of others.