A Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Analysis of Code-mixing in Pakistani TikTok Comments

Abstract

This paper examines code-mixing in English-Urdu in comments on Pakistani Tik Tok through the corpus based sociolinguistic method. Since the emergence of social media, bilingual language practices have been practiced in digital communication, which may indicate, both, creativity and social identity. The existence of 1000 comments on TikTok were gathered by boiling down 20 popular TikTok videos and examined through quantitative and qualitative approaches. The quantitative analysis was used to test the frequency, type and place of English insertions in Urdu comments. It was found that word-level code-mixing was the most common (65% of cases), then there was phrase-level mixing (25%), and sentence-level mixing (10%). The thematic analysis qualitatively involved the presence of English words that were mostly used at the beginning or within the middle of the text as emphasizing and stylistic markers: amazing, funny, and love. The qualitative thematic analysis identified four key functions of code-mixing: identity construction, humor and stylistic expression, social interaction and solidarity, and creative digital vernaculars. The users who are younger especially those who are aged between 16 and 22 showed stronger code-mix frequencies, and there were gender variations in functional use. Males mainly used code-mixing as a means of humor and assertiveness whereas the females used it to reveal their feelings and to share with their peers which proved that code-mixing is contextually based and socially motivated. The paper identifies TikTok as a source of linguistic innovation and engagement in communities demonstrating that English–Urdu code-mixing has a purposeful social and communicative role. This study adds into the knowledge of bilingual practices of digital communication and motivates the idea of conducting further research on the use of language in the scenarios of online social media.