AN ANALYSIS OF CODE SWITCHING USED BY FACEBOOKERS (a Case Study in a Social Network Site)

The objectives of this research entitled "Analysis of Code Switching used by Facebookers" were to find out what types of code - switching occurred in the facebookerscomments, how often did the code - switching types occurred in facebookerscomments and to find out the reasons why the Facebookers switch their language. In this research the writer used Qualitative method. The populations were 20 Indonesian college student facebook users who were also chosen randomly from "friend list" of the writers facebook account, the sample was entire population. The data collected through recording their comments from March 18 th to April 17 th , 2012 viewed in the 10 users' profiles comment columns. The data were analyzed and classified into the category of each types of code-switching based on Poplacks theory and how often those code-switching appeared in their comments. To analyze the reasons why the Facebookers used code -switching in their comment, the writer used Hoffmans theory. The findings of the research showed that: the facebookers tended to use inter-sentential switching (58.97%), intra-sentential switching (33.33%) and tag switching (7.69%). The reason why the facebookers used code- switching included: because of real lexical need (45%), Talking about a particular topic (40%) and because of speech content clarification (5%).