Advertisements, as a media of language contact, are the bridge between the producers and consumers. The language used in advertisements is expected to gain the public’s attention. This study observed Indonesian-English code-switching phenomenon occurring within the dialogue or monologue in Indonesian TV commercials. This study aims to 1) classify the types of Indonesian-English code-switching in audio visual mass media, 2) identify the switched elements and the syntactic categories, 3) figure out and elaborate the objectives of the switching aside from the broad purpose as an attention-getter. This research applies a descriptive qualitative method with content analysis as the technique of collecting data. There are 85 data in the form of words, phrases, and sentences taken from 38 sources of data.
The result of the analysis shows that 1) intrasentential switching is dominating the findings, 2) the switched elements are categorized into 11 syntactic categories, and the noun phrase is the most prevalent among all, 3) code-switching is performed to meet language facility purpose, language economy purpose, stylistic purpose, to emphasize the message, and to express multiple images and identities of the products. In the end, it is suggested that the other future researchers conduct a further study about codes-witching and obtain more data so that tag-switching in commercials can be analyzed.
Keywords: bilingualism, code-switching, advertisement, TV commercial
