A case study of the use of Thai words in English-based discourse on Facebook by the Thai university students in the UK

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been widely used as a medium of communication in global and local scales. This study examines the reasons why the Thai university students in the United Kingdom decide to mix Thai words in their English-based discourse on Facebook including the contextual functions of these words and the attitudes of the focus group towards this language phenomenon. In order to elicit the data to support this study, online questionnaire and interview have been conducted to find out the language behaviours and attitudes towards this phenomenon. The real samples texts have also been collected from the Facebook Wall of the focus group in order to reveal the recurring patterns and linguistic features. The CMDA (Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis) is adopted to analyse the collected data. The results seem to indicate that the constraints of technology play a significant role to shape the language choice of the focus group and there are some unique linguistic features which have been developed by the focus group in order to facilitate CMC. Multilingual CMC is relatively discussed to compare with Thai CMC.