Background of the Study
One interesting language feature that can be found in ‘HAI’ teenage magazine is prominent borrowing of words, phrases, or even sentences from
English language juxtaposed with Indonesian words, phrases, or sentences to create interesting language utterances. In addition, the writers of the articles are
aware of their process of adoption by italicizing those foreign language elements. This becomes a phenomenon because the adoption is employed prominently.
Almost in every page of the magazine, there are so many words from English language that exist within Indonesian utterances.
This phenomenon can be explained by linguists by the term code- switching
. Asher 1994: 581 explains “the term ‘code-switching’ refers to the juxtaposition of elements from two or more languages or dialects.” So, someone
may switch the language that she or he uses from one language to another. She or he can produce a language utterance which consists of language elements from
two or more different languages. It can be found in ‘HAI’ teenage magazine in which the writers produce Indonesian utterances with the language elements of
Indonesian and English language. There are a number of reasons for code-switching. One of them can be a
matter of necessity. Sometimes, people find some difficulty to explain something in their native language expression since there is no obvious word or expression of
the language to be used. As the compensation they decide to find the more obvious expression from other languages. They employ the more expressive or
representative word or phrase from foreign languages to explain what they want to say, so they speak with two different languages. For example, Indonesians
frequently borrow ‘gender’ from English language. It can be seen in a popular 2
phrase of Indonesian language kesetaraan gender. Indonesians prefer borrowing an English word ‘gender’ to using an Indonesian phrase jenis kelamin. It is not
strange at all to find an alteration between two different languages within a single utterance, which is called code-switching, as far as the speaker has appropriate
reasons to apply it. There is a great deal of implementation of code-switching dealing with the
foreign language elements which are borrowed. There is apparent distinction on the length of these elements which vary from a single word up to a complete
sentence. Language theories are chief matters which should be obeyed as guidance toward better understanding and implementation of various kinds of code-
switching. Since ‘HAI’ teenage magazine is one of the Indonesian public media
which carries out education mission, it needs appropriate reasons for borrowing language elements from foreign language, in this case English language, to be
juxtaposed with Indonesian utterances.