Abstract—A bilingual’s repertoire consists of two or more languages or codes and bilingual’s mix the codes in the course of conversation. In India, where English is a language of prestige, code mixing with English symbolizes higher status. Does only the prestige status of English make children use English while speaking in their mother tongue? What are the reasons of code mixing among children then? This study describes the nature of language behavior of Tamil-English bilingual children. This study throws light on the direction in which language change is taking place. Index Terms—Code mixing, bilingual children, language purity, tamil-English mixing. I. INTRODUCTION Code mixing English with mother tongue has become a regular practice among bilinguals. This phenomenon is largely observed amongst educated people though not absolutely absent amongst less educated and uneducated. Code mixing with English by Tamils has been evidenced in numerous fields: television, radio, college, business etc. Exposure to English from various sources has been one of the major reasons for code mixing with English. Mixing mother tongue and English is observed among kids too. Early exposure to English makes them bilingual from an early age. They also start mixing the two languages at an early age. This research paper tries to examine the speech of children in the age group 7-12 and answer the following questions: 1) What are the factors for code mixing among children? 2) Do children raised in bilingual setting code mix more? 3) What is the extent of mixing English in a Tamil conversation by children? This research will provide information on Tamil-English code mixing by children in Tamilnadu. Earlier research on bilingual code mixing among youngsters has shown that the younger generation code mixes for reasons like - easy to pronounce, to gain fluency in English, English words understood better, don‟t know Tamil equivalents, easy to express in English than in Tamil, prestigious to use English, modern and lack of Tamil equivalents [1]. This study looks into the code mixing pattern of children and the reasons for which they code mix. It will also throw light on the direction in which language change is taking place. Language mixing is an advanced form of bilingual communication [2]. Bilingual individuals can modulate at any given moment, falling along a continuum of language modes that ranges from a monolingual language mode to a Manuscript received May 3, 2014; revised July 6, 2014. Kanthimathi Krishnasamy is with the Department of English, SDNB Vaishnav College for Women, Chennai, India (e-mail: kanthi.english@gmail.com). bilingual language mode. Language mixing is a behavior that is characteristic of the bilingual language mode [3]. Parents‟ bilingual language mode with the children must definitely influence the language behavior of the children. Chaudhary claims that knowledge of language(s) is stored together in the multilingual mind and the presence of multiple language features in a mind creates a mixed pattern of speech [4]. II. LITERATURE REVIEW Studies on language acquisition confirm that knowledge of language is acquired and human mind can process multiple variations within a language. Language is a mental knowledge that is biologically predisposed to humans. This knowledge is universal because every language has same underlying formatives and rules. Once the universal formatives and rules are fixed, then it is believed that children can acquire any variations within and across languages. Humans are not specifically predisposed to acquire whatever human language is presented to them in childhood [5]. Children can acquire any language at any time. They can learn more than one language at a time. They can communicate with ease within and across language. Children can access more than two languages data simultaneously through the acquisition process. Empirical findings suggest that children are used to two different language words within an expression simultaneously. They don‟t face any obstacle to communicate their message by using the words from the two languages within an utterance. Major [6] reports that, a child acquires the phonetic forms of words of two different languages independently. In the Indian context, especially in cities, where children grow up with two languages, there is simultaneous acquisition of two languages. Children brought up in bilingual environment will be „dominant‟ in one language or the other, sometimes variably at different stages of development, depending in part on the language environments in which they spend their time, but also on their individual preferences [7]. Studies have also shown that person‟s degree of bilingualism or proficiency in the two languages can change, even have a complete shift to one language forgetting the other based on the needs of the communication. Though there is no dearth of multilingual data in India, not many studies discuss children‟s language acquisition. III. METHODOLOGY The main focus of studies on code mixing has been on informal spoken interaction. Hence, data for this research was mainly taken from informal speech interactions between children. Spontaneous speech samples of sixty bilingual Code Mixing among Tamil – English Bilingual Children Kanthimathi Krishnasamy International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, Vol. 5, No. 9, September 2015 788 DOI: 10.7763/IJSSH.2015.V5.557