Abstract
Without any exception, Pakistani undergraduate students are bilinguals. They start
learning both Urdu and English from primary level. Although Urdu is the national
language of the country, English is predominantly used in top bureaucracy, judiciary
and all the competitive exams. Hence, there is a need for the students to be competent
in both the languages. The outburst of social media and the availability of both these
languages on the social media platforms mean that people can use either of the two
languages. This exploratory study aimed at exploring the language preferences of
Pakistani bilingual undergraduate students, both male and female, on social media.
The study was qualitative in nature and employed semi-structured interviews as
research tools. The students were asked a range of questions on themes like their
preferred language, script, the reasons behind preferring one language over the
other, the language preference of the people in their friend lists, and the resultant
communication gap, if any. The interview data was then triangulated with the
Facebook posts of the same students for the sake of cross validation. The findings
suggest that although there are some differences in the language preferences of male
and female students, the reasons are similar. While some of the students prefer Urdu
over English due to ideological reasons, others do so because they believe it will be
easier for them to communicate with the friends. Meanwhile, those preferring
English over Urdu report that they do so because they want to practice writing
English since it is an international lingua franca and with its help they can reach out
to more and more people throughout the world.
Dr. Muhammad Rashid Hafeez, Dr. Ali Ahmad, Dr. Rana Faqir Muhammad Aslam. (2018) Pakistani Bilingual Undergraduate Students' Language Preferences on Social Media, Orient Research Journal of Social Sciences, Volume 3, Issue 2.
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