Language choices of Dayak Bidayuh undergraduates in the friendship domain

Sarawak is the largest of the fourteen states in Malaysia. The Dayak Bidayuhs form the fourth largest ethnic group in Sarawak after the Ibans, Malays and Chinese. There are four major Bidayuh dialectal groups and the major linguistic problem facing them is that there is no common Bidayuh language. The sociolinguistic norms of the younger generation of Bidayuhs today are also influenced by Bahasa Malaysia, Sarawak Malay dialect and English. The objectives of this research are to determine the extent of the use of these codes in the friendship domain across three dialect groups of the rural and urban younger generation of Dayak Bidayuh undergraduates and to investigate the reasons for their code/s selection. The data was collected through audio recordings and transcriptions of 32 casual conversations and face-to-face interviews