Weibo is the abbreviation of micro blog, which is a platform for sharing, spreading and gaining information based on user relationship. The user can create the personal accounts, update with about 140 words and share information instantly through WEB or WAP clients. Twitter is the first weibo and the most famous one in the world. Sinaweibo is created by Sina, a Chinese portal site. By the year of 2012, the number of weibo users in China is nearly 200 million including the ordinary people, celebrities, government officials and government agencies, occupying the first place in the world. 60% of users actively use weibo through the mobile client and they create a tremendous number of weibos every day.

Code-switching serves as an indispensable role to human communication. As the Internet develops, several traits of language in real word have been transplanted to the visual word. Due to the greatest number and multiple weibo users, code-switching also occurs plentifully in Sinaweibo. Code-switching is popularly adopted to interact with their friends and expand the social circle. Among the 200micro blogs selected randomly from the Sinaweibo, there are 58weibos containing the code-switching which occupies 29% of total number. Code-switching plays a indispensable role in the weibo world.

1.2 Significance of the Thesis

This thesis aims to reveal the motivation of Chinese-English code-switching on the SinaWeib and shows a systematic and academic analysis about the origin of code-switching on micro blog. It accounts theoretically for the occurrence of Chinese-English code-switching and emphasizes the importance of code-switching in Internet communication. As more and more bilinguals and multilingual adopt code-switching to realize their communicative goals, the research on code-switching is an important aspect of the study of bilinguals’ communicative competence and a significant facet of the study of language change. With the findings of study, the weibo users are able to gain an insight into the usage of code-switching and application of code-switching more dynamically in the net communication.

1.3 Research Methodology 

The paper employs the combined research methodology consisting of qualitative and quantitative study. The materials are chosen randomly from the microblogs on Sina from December, 2012 to April, 2013. There are 20 micro blogs being analyzed in total, which are entirely Chinese-English ones. Based on Verscheren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Yu Guodong’s Adaptation Model of Code-switching, the thesis is to categorize and analyze the adaptability of Chinese-English code-switching of the micro blogs. 

2 Literature Review

2.1 Definitions of Code and Code-switching

Code is a linguistic term, referring to a language, speech variety, or dialect. It is sometimes considered to be a more neutral term than the others. “People also use “code” when they want to stress the use of a language variety in a particular community (Chen Junzhang, 2012:103).” “Generally, code refers to any semiotic system used in communication which can be a language, dialect, variety or register (Wardhaugh, 1998: 86).” Code can be different language signals such as writing language and drawing language. It also can be different languages such as Chinese and English. Mandarin and Cantonese are also different codes.

With Regard to code-switching, there are different views. According to Fraomkin, code-switching means that a sentence is inserted by a word or a phrase while using, or that the shift of use between two codes or two varieties. “Scotton holds that code-switching means using two or more than two speech varieties in the same conversation (Xi Hongmei, 2006: 133).” Verschueren’s definition is “any distinguishable variant of a language, involving systematic sets of choices, whether linked to specific geographical area, a social class, an assignment of functions, or a specific context of use.” (Verschueren, 1999: 118). “From the sociolinguistic approach, it is called code-switching that one kind of code switches to another as the change of roles or spheres (Guo Xi, 2004: 195).” To summarize, code-switching is the phenomenon that the speaker uses one kind of language from another kind of language due to the practical needs, which is the language contact produced during the communication. “That the usage of different languages in a sentence, or in the various occasions without changes of topic can also be regarded as code-switching（Liu Runqing, Wen Xu, 2006: 12）.” The people use two languages or two dialects in their communication and switch one to another. For example, a person inserts some English words even English sentences in a Chinese conversation, or a person from Canton uses some his local words in the mandarin communication with a person speaking mandarin.