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The 21st century technology has increased their visibility and the use among the ordinary people in the society. This widely spread usage of internet can be seen among Bruneians as well. By 31 December 2017, 94.6% of Brunei’s total population had access to internet and it is expected that it will further grow in 2018 (Internet world stats, 2018). The emergence of internet and modern means of communication facilitates computer mediated communication (CMC) where a new type of language has emerged (Herring, 2012). According to Crystal (2006) this new type of language contains features of daily speech and writing as well as some electronically mediated properties. Androutsopoulos (2011) mentions that compared to other traditional media, more instances of code switching and code mixing are found on internet.
Since it can be seen that so many interaction occur online, it would be interesting to learn about the online language use among Bruneians. Coates (2013) states that, “when speakers are bi- or multilingual, then language choice can have a key role in the construction of gendered identities” As Brunei is a multilingual country, where most of its population is bilingual at least in English and Malay, code-switch can be identified commonly in face to face interaction among the young educated Bruneians and same behavior can be observed in the online language usage as well (Wood, 2016). Since code-switching offline is a widely studied area, the purpose of this study is to investigate code-switching among native Brunei university students on internet.
Jones (2012 cited in Wood, 2016 ) states that national System of Education for the 21st century, SPN21, which was introduced in 2009 has promoted to teach mathematics and science in English from the primary school. Before the introduction of SPN21, the education system was such that for the first three years of primary school it was Malay-medium and then from the fourth year of primary onwards it was shifted to English-medium (Ministry of Education 2009, p. 26). This being the case, it is expected that the majority of Bruneians to be bilingual. Further, the tertiary education in the country is also recognized to be bilingual Ishamina (2017) mentions that, “UBD (University Brunei Darussalam) was set up in 1985 as a bilingual university that offered both Malay-and English medium programmes”.
Code-switching is commonly found throughout East and Southeast Asia. In Brunei it has been observed that code-switching between Brunei Malay and English is very common (McLellan, 2010). As code-switching is commonly recognized in the country, UBD students tend to code-switch even in the classroom. Noor Azam, Zurinah, Liyana, Suciyati and Saidai (2014, as cited in Ishamina & Deterding, 2017) report that, “students often code-switch when talking among themselves and also when they are speaking with their local tutors.” However they are likely to use English to interact with the foreign lectures and academic staff and code-switching has been hardly observed (Deterding and Salbrina ,2013, p. 107, as cited in in Ishamina & Deterding, 2017).
As mentioned early code-switching is a common linguistic feature in Brunei and it is found in both offline and online interactions. Wood (2016) mentions that on internet Bruneians tend to code-switch not only between Malay and English but also use other languages such as Arabic. Moreover it is seen that women tend to code-switch more often than men (Nurdiyana Daud 2012, p. 86, as cited in Wood, 2016). Therefore this study will try to find out , whether gender influence choice of code-switching, whether language choice for code-switching is influenced by the gender and finally whether frequency of code-switching depend on gender.
An online questionnaire (Appendix 1) was used to collect data for this study. The questionnaire was designed to get an overview about the online language use among UBD students and consisted 7 multiple choice questions. The link to the questionnaire was distributed via Whatsapp, a highly used social media platform among the UBD students. Access for the questionnaire was limited to one week. Table 1 shows information about the respondents and their first language (L1) and their second language (L2).
Table 2 shows the respondents language choice in their day-to-day online interactions. As shown in table 2, 62.5% of female respondents stated that they do code-switch in their online conversations, whereas only 56.3% male respondents acknowledged that they code-switch in online conversations. It seems that female like to code-switch on internet. As somebody stated female tend to code-switch more than male as it is seen as a norm of the society. However the difference drawn from this study is not that significant (X2 = 0.12955, df = 1, p-value = 0.7189), so no conclusion can be drawn.
The results supports the initial hypothesis of this study, that female prefer to code switch more than male. However there have been few limitations in this study such as, limited number of respondents, respondents were not fully aware about certain lexical items that were used. Therefor a complete and a general conclusion cannot be drawn based on this study. Further studies to trangulise this study may help to arrive at a solid conclusion about the influence of gender on online language preference.
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