Attitudes towards Chinese-English Code-Mixing in Mainland China: Why Some Code-Mixings Are Negatively Regarded

Abstract

In mainland China, previous studies have shown that Chinese-English code-mixing is gaining wide popularity while very limited researches focus on the public attitudes towards Chinese-English code-mixing. This paper therefore investigates the general perception of Chinese-English code-mixing in mainland China, specifically whether code-mixing is viewed favorably or unfavorably. By conducting online questionnaires which mainly examine the English proficiency of the respondents, their code-mixing usages and their attitudes towards code-mixing in mainland China, this paper aims to find out whether different types of code-mixings would lead to different attitudes of respondents, moreover, whether there would be a certain code-mixing type which is particularly liked or disliked. This paper illustrates the idea of Bhatia and Ritchie (2012)- “four factors determining language choice and mixing on the part of the bilingual”. Furthermore, this paper contends to analyze the topic by considering the aspects of individual and the social level in terms of psychology, history, education and politics (Bhatia & Ritchie, 2012).