Multi-language Contact The Malaysian Chinese Code Switching

Malaysia is a multi-racial country. Malays, Chinese and Indians are the main races. Thus, bilingualism and trilingualism are some of the issues faced by a multi-racial country. Among the three races, Chinese is the second largest community. Hence, the language use and language attitudes of the Chinese have drawn linguists' attention. This paper is based on the survey of 412 students of Chinese private high school. It explores the language use and language attitudes of Chinese in Pulang Pinang of Malaysia towards the Malay, Chinese, Chinese dialects and English. Code-switching, one of the newest focuses for the bilingual research, means changing from one kind of code to another one in the same communication course. In the paper, I made use of social linguistic method to do the research of code-switching motivation in a society. Questionnaire and interview are done and analyzed by using SPSS software. The analysis shows that Malay, Chinese, Chinese dialects and English occupy different domains. The results of survey also show that code-switching is a common language phenomenon in Malaysia.