An Investigation On English/Chinese Code-mixing On Campus

Nearly all languages can hardly exist in isolation in the process of social development, because they will contact with other languages to some degree and bring new changes. English/Chinese code-mixing is just the result of language contact and interaction. As a new social-cultural phenomenon, it has received a lot of concerns from linguistics in recent years. With the development of reform and opening-up, and the improvement of English status, English is becoming more and more important in China and people's English proficiency generally has improved a lot. English/Chinese code-mixing has been frequently used in people's daily communication. Especially on campus, people use English/Chinese code-mixing more frequently than others.The present research is carried out in Xiangtan University, and 144 students, teachers and other people on campus are the research subjects of this study. By means of social network, participant observation and other research methods, the author collects a large amount of data of English/Chinese code-mixing through tape-recording and observing the spontaneous speech on campus. After that, a questionnaire survey is conducted as a supplement in order to investigate English/Chinese code-mixing on campus. Finally, by means of several soft wares such as SPSS (13.0), Excel (2007) and GOLDVARB X, we analyze the collected data quantitatively with the mathematical statistics methods.The research results indicate that English/Chinese code-mixing is used frequently on campus in daily communication. While in the EL (embedded language) lexical categories of English/Chinese code-mixing, single lexical categories appear with a much higher frequency than phrases, and nouns are switched with the highest frequency among all of the EL lexical categories. Gender, major and English proficiency have an impact on the usage of English/Chinese code-mixing on campus. Females use English/Chinese code-mixing more frequently than males; the students of English major use English/Chinese code-mixing with a much higher frequency than non-English majors; people with relatively high level of English proficiency use English/Chinese code-mixing more often than those with relatively low level of English proficiency. In addition, family background and occupation also influence the usage of English/Chinese code-mixing on campus to some extent. All in all, the campus people take a neutral or positive attitude towards English/Chinese code-mixing on campus. Gender, major, family background, English proficiency and occupation have great influence on individuals'attitudes towards this linguistic phenomenon.In such open environment at present, the cross-cultural and cross-economic communications among different countries become more and more frequent. Language, as the carrier of culture, surely influences each other to some extent. The new language varieties have enriched the connotation of Chinese, but they also bring in some negative impact on our mother tongue and culture. So language planning should be made urgently in order to make these new language varieties develop in harmony with Chinese and adapt to our language system.Owing to the imperfect research methods and conditions, the conclusions of this research are not mature enough, and more in-depth researches on this subject are needed to do in future.