Chinese-english Code-mixing And Self-identities

As English has gradually become a “global language”, the linguistic phenomenonof Chinese-English code-mixing is becoming more and more common in China. Thephenomenon has been paid great attention to by scholars and has been regarded as oneof the hot topics in the field of sociolinguistics in recent years. Sociolinguistic studiesfound that people are influenced by language variation. From the languages used by acertain individual, one can identify the speaker’s age, social class, educationalbackground as well as speaker’s self-identity etc. Since code-mixing is a speciallanguage phenomenon, and also a kind of activities of the individual, it is possible andsignificant to explore the relationship between code-mixing and self-identity.The present study is undertaken to analyze the Chinese-English code-mixingphenomenon in spoken Chinese on campus and expected to explore the relationshipbetween Chinese-English code-mixing and self-identity of undergraduates. Byanalyzing the Chinese-English code-mixing phenomenon in spoken Chinese amongundergraduates in Beijing University of Technology, the study tries to find out thecharacteristics and reasons of Chinese-English code-mixing on campus, explore theindividual preference and degree of tolerance towards Chinese-English code-mixing,and probe into the relationship between Chinese-English code-mixing andself-identity changes.Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted in this study. Throughthe questionnaire survey and the semi-open style interview, the major findings of thisstudy are as follows:(1) Chinese-English code-mixing is quite common and popular on campus andundergraduates bear high degrees of tolerance towards this phenomenon. Students’code-mixing preference, code-mixing tolerance and code-mixing reasons are allsignificantly correlated with different aspects of students’ self-identity changes.(2) Undergraduate students tend to code-mix English into Chinese in their dailygreetings and when they chat about the topics of entertainment. Furthermore, English majors use more code-mixing than non-English majors.(3) The degree of tolerance of code-mixing among college students has alreadyreached a relatively high level and junior grade students bear higher degrees oftolerance of code-mixing than senior grade students. Meanwhile, the statistic analysisof201participants indicates students prefer to code-mix simple words most andstudents also use other forms of Chinese-English code-mixing.(4) Factor analysis results indicate that the factors that influence undergraduateswhen they use code-mixing can be classified as factors outside the conversations andfactors within the conversations; and factors within the conversations are the mainforce that causes students to use Chinese-English code-mixing.(5) Concerning the relationship between students’ code-mixing and self-identitychanges, the study shows that those students who bear high degrees of code-mixingtolerance and who prefer to mix various kinds of English words and expressions aremore likely to undergo positive self-identity changes. The canonical correlationanalysis results suggest that those students who use Chinese-English code-mixingbecause of the factors outside the conversation are more likely to undergoself-confidence change; for the students who use Chinese-English code-mixingbecause of the factors within the conversation, they show zero-change of theirself-identity.The overall result shows that there is close relationship between Chinese-EnglishCode-mixing and individuals’ self-identities. It is hoped that this study will help us toprobe into the college students’ perceptions of language, culture and themselves, andfurthermore provide some reference for college English teaching and learning.Meanwhile, since few researches analyzed the relationship between code-mixing andself-identities, this study has made a relatively new attempt.