Power Relations and Code Switching between Javanese College Students: A Case Study in Faculty of Humanities, UDINUS

Abstract

Code-switching is an inevitable phenomenon in a bilingual and multilingual community. The aim of this study is to discover the code-switching used in multilingual communities and its relation with the power relationship of interactants. This research used a descriptive qualitative method and the data were collected from two audio recordings of six multilingual college students. All of the participants speak three languages fluently, i.e. Ngoko Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia, and English. The first voice recording contained a conversation between a college senior and a junior conversing about college students’ organizations. The second voice recorder contained the conversations among three students in the same batch. The results show that in the first recording, of the speakers used Bahasa Indonesia (high variety) most of the time (82%), followed by Ngoko Javanese (low variety) for 16%; and English (high variety) for 2%. While in the second recording, the speakers mostly used Ngoko Javanese (66%), followed by Bahasa Indonesia for 32%, and a few English (2%). It can be conclude that ‘seniority’ and power relation affect the use of language choice in the data. The students consider that it is rather impolite to use Ngoko Javanese to their senior, while it is more acceptable to use Ngoko Javanese among their friends from the same batch.