409 CODE-SWITCHING IN WHATSAPP-EXCHANGES: CULTURAL OR LANGUAGE BARRIER? Idha Nurhamidah Fakultas Bahasa dan Komunikasi,Universitas Islam Sultan Agung idhanurhamidah@unissula.ac.id Abstract This paper explores the employment of code-switching in Social Media „Whats-app (WA)‟ Bahasa text, namely from Bahasa to Javanese, English and/or to Arabic. Two WA groups are chosen namely „Trending Topic‟ and „LPPM‟ WA group as they are more universal chat places for Unissula academia than other faculty limited members of WA groups. This is a descriptive qualitative research, deeply analyzing several purposefully selected data. Interviews with some members of WA groups were performed to gain some data related to the use of code switching. The writer found that the main reason for code-switching is therefore to keep on communication by using technology-related, Koranic-related or Javanese-colloquial terms to try to refer to certain concepts of which the equivalence for such terms are not available in Bahasa. Another reason is to gain closer-relationship among attendants. For this socio-linguistic phenomenon, the writer feels that it is necessary for Bahasa experts or scholars to coin and popularize more Bahasa lexical items required to accommodate the new concepts. Key words: code-switching, Bahasa, Bahasa Experts, technology- related terms, Koranic-related terms, Javanese-colloquialterms Introduction Bahasa is a language attributed to a formal meeting as it is declared as the national language since its declaration back in 1928. The language has developed more in both lexical and rhetorical scopes. Current general dictionary of Bahasa „Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI)‟ copes more than 65.000 words or 23.000 by Purwadharminta. (Chaer & Agustina, 2010:139). This is not much at all when compared with English which has more than 600.000 words (Chaer, 2010:139), Arabic which has 90 million or from another list 500 million (Da‟na, 2015), or Javanese which has 1 to 2 million only in ngoko version (www.uni.edu/becker/Javanese.html). It is arguably true that the older the more words a language has. Bahasa speakers, even in a formal meeting, as the lack of equal concept, use another language/code to communicate. They do it in informal meeting as well, include in social media What App conversation. In here, the conversation is limited to „Trending Topic‟ and „LPPM‟ WA group. This two WA groups are chosen as they are more universal chat places for Unissula academia than other faculty limited members of WA groups. Data shows, very often they switch to English in response to lexical drawbacks in technology-related term, switch to Arabic in response to unequal Koranic-related term, or switch to Javanese to gain closer-relationship among attendants. This sociolinguistics phenomenon has been going on for decades without any concerns on the part on Bahasa experts and users alike. Even they seem to be proud