International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 45

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
argument, I predict that the language used on Facebook among my Indonesian peers
includes English borrowing and Indonesian-English code-switching, and these contribute to
the development of Indonesian-English norms.
Methodology
The data were taken from my personal Facebook timeline. From 26 March to 30 March
2015 I captured incidents of English borrowing and English-Indonesian code-switching.
Identities of the respondents are not featured. Although there is no exact data of their
profile, I would describe the people on my Facebook timeline as mostly 18 – 45 years old.
Their education level may vary. Some of them were my students at undergraduate level,
while some others have completed a Bachelor’s degree and are either working or pursuing a
higher degree. Since the samples are taken randomly, the English proficiency level of the
respondents cannot be tracked. Gender may not be an issue since that is not the focus of
the study. A notice was sent to each of the respondents whose text is used in this study.
Objection has not been received.
Similar to da Silva’s (2013) study, I then classified the types of borrowing based on
Haugen’s (1956) typology of borrowings. Poplack’s (1980) classification of code-switching
guided the analysis. More importantly, grammar, vocabulary and discourse style of the
incidents were identified to help define the characteristics of Indonesian English. The three
features, together with the pronunciation, are described by Jenkins (2015) as the main
levels which distinguish English variations from that in the inner circle. I eliminate the
pronunciation aspect since the data are in written form.
Findings and discussion
There were 47 incidents in which at least one English word or acronym or abbreviation was
used in the Facebook posts written by my Indonesian peers. Please note that this is not a
thorough observation. Since the display on Facebook shows random posts from several
different days, it is rather difficult to get the exact percentage of texts using Indonesian only,
English only or English-Indonesian code-switching.
The code-switching and borrowing
Among the 47 incidents, 25 of the texts are in full English. The other 22 include IndonesianEnglish code-switching, 2 of which consist of tag-switching, 10 consist of intra-sentential
switching and 7 of them include inter-sentential switching. The other 3 incidents, however,
insert an Indonesian word as a switch in an English context.
In the tag-switching and intra-sentential switching, 22 English borrowings are found.
One of them shows loan blend as in:
(1)

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