A Sociolinguistic Study of English Code-Switching in Indonesia’s 2024 Presidential Debates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59011/austronesian.5.3.2026.811-821Keywords:
Sociolinguistics, Code-Switching, Political Discourse, Identity Construction, Indonesian Presidential DebateAbstract
This study examines English code-switching in the Third 2024 Indonesian Presidential Debate from a sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on its structural types, communicative functions, and meanings related to identity construction, power representation, and social positioning. Employing a qualitative descriptive design, the study analyzed utterances produced by Anies Baswedan, Prabowo Subianto, and Ganjar Pranowo using the official debate recording published by the Komisi Pemilihan Umum Republik Indonesia (KPU RI) on YouTube. The data were analyzed using Poplack’s (1980) classification of code-switching and Appel and Muysken’s (2005) framework of sociolinguistic functions. The findings identified 51 instances of English code-switching, comprising 15 instances from Anies Baswedan, 15 from Prabowo Subianto, and 21 from Ganjar Pranowo. Three major sociolinguistic meanings were identified: power representation (22 instances), social positioning (16 instances), and identity construction (13 instances). Intra-sentential code-switching was the dominant type, whereas inter-sentential code-switching occurred only once and tag-switching was absent. Four communicative functions were identified: referential, expressive, metalinguistic, and poetic or rhetorical, with the referential function being the most prominent. These findings demonstrate that English code-switching serves as a context-dependent linguistic resource for communicating specialized knowledge and constructing political self-representation in formal political discourse.
References
Anjari, E. P., & Prayitno, H. J. (2025). Pseudo politeness strategies in the 2024 Indonesian presidential and vice presidential candidate debate discourse and their implications as teaching material for argumentation texts in high schools. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Education for All (ICEDUALL 5 2024) (pp. 83–97). Atlantis Press. https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-386-3_7
Appel, R., & Muysken, P. (2005). Language contact and bilingualism. Amsterdam University Press.
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407
Chau, D., & Lee, C. (2021). “See you soon! ADD OIL AR!”: Code-switching for face-work in edu-social Facebook groups. Journal of Pragmatics, 184, 18–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.07.019
Chatpunnarangsee, K., & Osatananda, V. (2023). Code-switching between Thai and English in young Thai politicians’ speeches. Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Studies, 23(2), 351–363. https://doi.org/10.14456/hasss.2023.32
Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (2015). Language and power (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Fadlilah, A., Utari, R., & Iskandar, D. (2023). Bahasa dan identitas kelompok dalam pernyataan tokoh politik: Sebuah studi sosiolinguistik. Sasdaya: Gadjah Mada Journal of Humanities, 7(2), 172–189. https://doi.org/10.22146/sasdaya.10200
Foster, M., & Welsh, A. (2017). The controversial code-switching of an Indonesian president. South East Asia Research, 25(4), 395–411. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967828X17740459
Holmes, J. (2013). An introduction to sociolinguistics (4th ed.). Routledge.
Joseph, S. (2025). Code-switching in political news writings: A case study of three Indian English newspapers. Journal of Language and Culture, 44(2), 50–67.
Komisi Pemilihan Umum Republik Indonesia. (2024, January 7). Debat ketiga calon presiden Pemilu tahun 2024 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJdt-HBBGIo
Lim, S. W. X., & Ng, B. C. (2025). Perception of language variation in the speech of Singaporean political leaders. World Englishes, 44(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12682
Liu, R.-Y. (2024). Constituting institutional identity in political discourse: The use of the first-person plural pronoun in China’s press conferences. Language in Society, 53(3), 421–444. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404523000386
Mulyono, Laksono, K., Wuryaningrum, R., & Cahyo, A. A. R. (2025). The application of politeness principles in speech acts in the 2024 presidential election debate. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 12(1), Article 2495479. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2025.2495479
Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18(7–8), 581–618. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1980.18.7-8.581
Rahmat Hidayat, W. (2025). Code-switching and code-mixing in the podcast Elite Politik: Mahfud MD and Retno Marsudi (April 2025). Prosiding Seminar Nasional Pendidikan Bahasa dan Sastra Indonesia (Senapastra), 3, 168–176.
Saragih, F. L., Lestari, F. D., & Sinaga, N. T. (2025). Politeness strategy in the first debate of the 2024 Indonesian presidential candidate. Jurnal Riset Ilmu Pendidikan, 5(2), 439–443. https://doi.org/10.56495/jrip.v5i2.1071
Sierra, S. (2023). “A radical point of view”: The discursive construction of the political identity of student activists. Discourse & Society, 34(6), 772–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265231174983
Sravani, D., Kameswari, L., & Mamidi, R. (2021). Political discourse analysis: A case study of code mixing and code switching in political speeches. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching (pp. 1–5). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.calcs-1.1
Wardhaugh, R., & Fuller, J. M. (2021). An introduction to sociolinguistics (8th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
Yim, O., & Clément, R. (2021). Acculturation and attitudes toward code-switching: A bidimensional framework. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(5), 1369–1388. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069211019466
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Margaretha Theodora To, Deby Marisa Malelak, Oce Antipas Langkameng
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
