A Study on Code-Mixing in the Nepali Language in Super Markets

Abstract

This dissertation is basically a study of English code mixing inbusinesstransactions. The main objectives of the study are to find out themixed English wordsin Nepali discoursesin supermarketsandto find outthe age-wise and sex-wise trend of mixing English words insupermarkets. The sample population consists of those participantsinvolved in 100 different speech events in supermarkets. Altogether, theresearcher collected data from ten different business complexes. Theoverall study comes to an end that code mixing is an established featurein supermarkets. Word level mixing has been seen as the highestfrequency in all supermarkets. The researcher focuses on the age-wiseand sex-wise mixingof English words in theNepali conversations. Noresearch yet has been carried out in this area to see the features ofEnglish/Nepali code mixing. This thesis contains altogether four chapters. Chapter Onedealswith the introduction. It consists of general background, code switchingand code mixing, terminological issues, types of code switching,difference between code switching and code mixing, reasons for codemixing and code switching, review of related literature, objectives of thestudy, significance of the study and definition of specific terms. ChapterTwodeals with methodology. It encompassessources ofdata, population of the study, sample population, tools for data collection,process of data collection and limitations of the study. Chapter Three consists of analysis and interpretation of therequired data. It consists of four parts. Part one deals with the descriptionof English and Nepali words; part two deals with the analysis andinterpretation of the most frequently mixedwords,and the third part deals viii with the analysis and interpretation of the age-wise trends of mixingEnglish words and the last part deals with the sex-wise trends of mixingEnglish words. The data are analyzed on the basis of percentageandtheyare presented on the table. Chapter Four presents the summary of findings, pedagogicalimplications and recommendations. The study reveals that the greatest andtheleast number of words ofboth the languages occurred according to the situation, mode of thespeaker, their performance level, age and sex. Mostly the researcherfound the word level switching, i.e. code mixing rather than sentencelevel switching,i.e. code switching in supermarkets.