College Students’ Attitude toward “Chinese+English”Code Mixing

Abstract

Code-mixing is an natural phenomenon in multilingual and bilingual communities. As a result of language contact in China, code mixing is on the rise. This paper is devoted to exploring the attitude of contemporary college students towards the linguistic phenomenon of code mixing of Chinese and English. Through online survey and data analysis, this paper finds that the need to speak expressively, bring forth humorous effect and use euphemism to avoid awkward situation are the first three factors accounting for code-mixing.  As talkers , they tend to use code mixing of Chinese-English in informal situations with more intimate people; as listeners, they hope that such expressions can make humor and make the topic easy. In terms of usage, they are more willing to accept English expressions to avoid some disadvantages. Most of them are remaining neutral on supporting or opposing the code mixing of Chinese and English.