Conversational Code Mixing Among Jahangirnagar University Students: A Threat to Bengali or Not

The various factors of conversational code mixing in Bangladesh include the personal opinions of the respondents towards code mixing, the possibility of bilingualism and multilingualism, causes of and motivations behind code mixing and how it is a threat to the purity of Bengali. Code mixing is a very important issue in the context of Bengali language as codes from other languages have been used extensively in the linguistic behaviour of the Bengali speaking people. This paper focuses on Wardhaugh's (1992:107) definition of conversational code mixing which “involves the deliberate mixing of two languages without an associated topic change.” This paper adopts interview method to collect data which have been collected by a linguistic survey conducted in two departments of a public university. Analysis of the data reveals that code mixing is not a threat to Bengali and is not exploiting the purity of Bengali rather opens up the horizon for the development of Bengali by including suitable components of other languages by proper language planning and careful handling of the situation for the enrichment and beautification of Bengali language. The paper also discovers probable causes of and motivations behind such code mixing.