To Switch and Mix or Not to: Code Switching and Code Mixing In Indian Film Songs

Abstract

Code-switching is a linguistic phenomenon that has been studied on both written and spoken discourses in the recent years. As Khubchandani (1986) opines code switching in Indian society is a necessary outcome of the way languages is used in everyday life of Indians. Also as he argues code switching is not a selection of convenience or ‘aesthetic’ but is a signifier of subtlety of purpose in a discourse and is highly functional. So, this study attempts to analyze code-switching in selected Indian film Songs. The data were collected from many websites.  The methodology of this study was a mixed (quantitative as well as qualitative) method.  The research investigated quantitatively the percentage of code-switching and code mixing occurrences occurred in the selected songs. The study qualitatively sought to identify intra-word switching occurred by using Indian language grammatical morphemes within these English code-switching, to see whether there is any differences in the percentage of code mixed English words in the lyrics of a film of Multilingual releases and to probe into the reasons for code-switching.

The study identified about a massive amount of 13,348 code mixed words which included 257 intra lexical code mixed words and 780 Inter- Sentential code switching. There were incidents of intra lexical code mixing. This study contributes to education, linguistics, and SLA by increasing readers' understanding of code-mixing in the most popular cinema songs. Because acquiring a second language is so vital in today's environment, the type of code-mixing that occurs in songs will serve as a platform for understanding the complexities of bilingualism and thereby is a significant contribution to Social study research. The researchers expect that their research will be useful to future academics who are interested in code mixing.