CODE SWITCHING ON FACEBOOK COMMENTS:
(An Analysis of Types and Reasons of Code Switching Written By the 8th Semester Students of English Department)
For Indonesian, or maybe others people around the world who have not English as their mother language, may use English as their second or third language. This is because English was claimed as international language that must be understood by everybody who has connected with other people who have different language. Because of the three-pronged development – of first-language, second-language, and foreign-language speakers – it is inevitable that a global language will eventually come to be used by more people than any other language. English has already reached this stage (Crystal, 2003: 6). When someone goes somewhere abroad, they need English skill to communicate with the other. And when they came back to their country, some of them are getting easier to talk by English than their own language. In this case, there is may somebody who can’t speak English very well, so the speaker have to speak their original language. Here, sometimes code switching are happen.
The development of technolgy is getting higher day by day and year by year. People are also getting easier to use technology for communication. Either to communicate with someone in local place who have the same language with us or with one in very far away with different language who never been met before. Getting communication seems be easier than the past, and today, there are so many communication media that support us to make a practice communication either with the people near us or with someone in far distance. It is such as letters, facsimile, phone, internet media, and so on.
Facebook is such a social networking that has the largest member in the world. Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 750 million active users (Wikipedia, 2011: 17th of July). Mark Zuckenberg, the founder, ever wants to close this site because it has too much member and caused some criminal on world. According to Wikipedia (2011: 17th of July), “Facebook has met with controversies. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Iran, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Bangladesh on different bases.” But beside there is a negative effect of facebook, there is sure also a positive effect of facebook, one of them is connecting people over the world.
The students of English department who learn English deeply are also exist on facebook. They learn English on their daily lecture day, so they surely may influenced by English on their own conversation. There are so much statuses, notes or comments on facebook containing English written by the students of English Department. They often switch their Bahasa Indonesia into English. This kind of situation may be called as code switching.
Language switching can actually happen only in the language of a bilingual. Bilingualism is the term for speaking one or more languages (Scotton, 2006: 2). In line with that explanation, the students of English Department can be considered as bilingual because they should have ability to speak English since they entered the department. The language situation in Indonesia is considered higher than the local languages and English is considered higher in prestige and social status than Bahasa Indonesia (Syafi’ie, 1981: 40). Therefore, English Department Students are likely to do code switching in their communication with others.
“Subahanallah...... yang namanya orang tua mah always pray for all of you. We hope all of you be success. That's way, belajarlah seriously.” That is the example of code switcing written by a student of English Department on facebook comments. We can find other much example of sentence like that doing by them because they as bilungual students have their own way to communicate with each other. We can defined it to the rare phenomenon. By switching the language li