Background of The Study

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

A. Background of The Study

In daily life people use language to communicate what they want to say. Language is very important as means of communication. Without language, the process of communication will not work. People are not able to get involved with their surroundings without using language and because of that, language has become a vital element in human life. In addition, language is system sounds, words, and patterns, which is used by human to communicate thoughts and feelings. 1 Language has already been defined differently according to various points of view. In general, it is defined as a means of communication by which people can communicate with others to transfer ideas, thought, feelings, attitudes or message. 2 Besides it is also a major aspect that distinguishes human than any others creatures on earth. Yet when animals utter something, they do not mean talk but just an activity of producing sound. Most Indonesian people are able to speak more than one language in their daily lives. People who can speak two languages are bilingual and if more than two languages called multilingual. As a result of having an ability of speaking several languages, people have a tendency to mix and switch their 1 Oxford Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary, Fourth Edition : 1995, p. 700. 2 Mohammad Farkhan, An Introduction to Linguistic Jakarta. UIN Press, 2006, p.8 1 languages. The tendency of mixing and alternation between two or more languages in a single conversation is called as code switching. Bilinguals tend to code switch when their interculators are also bilinguals or multilinguals. The code switching can take place between or even within a sentence. The switc h can involve a single word insertion from B language to A language, or switching between phrases and clauses within two languages or more than two languages 3 . When a community consists of bilinguals it is called a bilingual community; and in the same way, when more than two languages are spoken in a community, we can call them as multilingual community. Today, bilingual and multilingual societies are very common in many parts of the world. Some countries like Singapore, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, Rusia, and the Philipines where is a large population speaking of different vernaculars are a few of the examples of multilingual communities. Therefore, it is not wondered if we hear people use two or more languages while they are communicating with each other. And as a metter of fact, these people be considered as bilingual or multilingual. So it is important to know that code switching and code mixing is not negative phenomenon as a learning process of balancing the language that the person learns. It is just a normal requirement of daily living that people speak several languages perhaps one or more at home, another i n the village, still another for purpose of trade, and yet another for contact with outside world of wider 3 Francois Grosjean, Life With Two Languages, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982. p. 3 social or political organization. 4 And between bilingual speakers and speech communities differ as to the extent they paractice code switching in everyday life speakers, because some find themselves in situations where switching is possible or called for more often than other communities because norm for allocating languages to funtional dominans keeping them apart or allowing for mixed code are variable. 5 The phenomenon of code switching and code mixing not only happen in oral communication but also in written such as novel in uses code switching and mixing on language conversation. They switch and mix a language and others commonly to show their presige in their community. Based on the fact above, the writer chooses the Skripshit novel written by Alit Susanto published by Bukune in 2012 as a unit analysis. In this research, the writer finds so many code switching and code mixing cases in the dialogs of the novelthat can be analyzed.

B. Focus of the Study