A Sociolinguistic Study of English Code-Switching in Indonesia’s 2024 Presidential Debates

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.