Code Choice in Online Media: The Case of Malaysia Muda (Young) Leaders

Authors: Farrah Diebaa Rashid Ali (International Islamic University Malaysia)
Speakers: Farrah Diebaa Rashid Ali
Strand: Language, Community, Ethnicity
Session Type: General Session

Abstract

MUDA (Malaysian United Democratic Alliance), a multi-racial and youth-based party led by Syed Saddiq Abdul Rahman is the Malaysian youngest political party established in September 2020. The acronym MUDA is a homonym for ‘young’ in Malay. Since code-switch and code-mix in inevitable among multilingual young adults regardless of their geographical backgrounds, this study aimed to look at how the leaders of MUDA are true to the ‘young’ and multi-racial identity they are putting on through the analysis of the language that they use on their social media. Holmes & Wilson’s (2022) is the main reference that guides the analysis of this paper. It was discovered that their code-mix and code-switch are not limited to the inter-sentential and intrasexual but also include tag-switching. The code-switch and code-mix were motivated by the topics, emotions, and lexical borrowing, the mixing and switching were done to emphasize the party’s identities which are ‘young’ and multiracial.

Keywords: Code-switch, code-mix, political party, identity