engleski

Psychological and sociological reasons for code-switching in online communication

This thesis deals with the topic of code switching between Croatian to English in online communication by bilingual participants whose native language is Croatian. For the purpose of this paper, a case study of code-switching on the WhatsApp mobile chatting application was performed. The study was conducted on three different WhatsApp chat groups and directly involved six participants aged between 24 and 27, including the researcher. The results showed that code-switching was used very often by the participants of active WhatsApp chats, as opposed to wider WhatsApp chats where it was used seldom, suggesting that monolingualism can be understood as a linguistic reflection of extralinguistic distance between the participants. Moreover, the results show that it is possible to distinguish between two types of code-switching, supra-group and intra-group code-switching, as well as that the participants tended to use code-switching words/phrases mostly once and never repeated them again, which points to the dynamic nature of language contact in online communication. All the results suggest that the reasons for code-switching stem from the social relations within the chat groups, which are in their essence communities of practices, that code-switching use depends on the positioning of participants within a certain group, and that WhatsApp group organization facilitates construction of group identity and consequently leads to code-switching.

code-switching, online communication, WhatsApp, communities of practice, bilingualism

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