EXPLORING FUNCTIONS OF CODE-MIXING IN BEAUTICIAN-CLIENT CONVERSATIONS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PAKISTANI RURAL AND URBAN BEAUTY PARLORS

Abstract

The study explores the functions of Code-mixing in beautician-client conversations in Pakistani settings. Like in other bilingual and multilingual communities, code-mixing has attained a secure position verbally as a medium of communication among Pakistani bilingual speakers too. Code-mixing can occur in both formal and informal circumstances. Many researches have shown that the practice of alternating or mixing languages is not only common but serves important communication strategies also (Heller, 1992; Myers-Scotton, 1992). This quantitative cum qualitative research examines the patterns and functions of code-mixing in the conversations that were recorded after visiting certain urban and rural areas of Sargodha district of Pakistan. This research included how code-mixing is involved during speakers' communicative intents during English - Urdu bilingual conversations of Beauticians and their Clients in Pakistan. The purposive sampling technique has opted for data collection and the sample size, for this study, was ten beauty parlors from rural areas and ten from urban areas of Sargodha district of Pakistan.   After data collection, it was analyzed by using the models of Kachru (1992) and Gumperz (1982); two models have opted for this research attaining better results. The findings show that the functions of code-mixing in the conversations of beauticians and their clients were portraying a positive image, personality development, social image, and usage of such vocabulary that attract more customers. It was found that Inter-sentential mixing was used more frequently as compared to intra-sentential means the code-mixing at the word level was more common than at the phrase level in the conversations. During analysis the difference between Rural and Urban was also noticed, it was observed that urban speakers are keener to switch from Urdu to English.