This study set out to systemically observe and describe the mixing of English with Thai-based discourse, often termed code-mixing, in Thai television programs. Data came from 100 hours of programming randomly samples from five genres of Thai television programs – Thai drama, talk or variety shows, academic or hard talk shows, game shows and sports programs. 

Finding showed that code-mixing is common, with sports programs producing the most. A great number of code-mixing were single nouns. English mixes occurred even when Thai equivalents existed. A few were used for emphasis or clarification, but most were not. Celebrities produced the most code-mixing, followed by experts and authorities. Most of the code-mixing came from program hosts. 

Results suggest that code-mixing serves more than a simple utilitarian purpose: the majority of code-mixing displayed neither an emphatic function nor a linguistic need function. It may instead fall into other functional categories, such as a prestige motive or expressive functions observed in earlier studies of code-mixing of English in other languages. Many of the English words embedded into the Thai language have undergone modification: truncation, reduplication, or syntactical change. These processes of nativization of English words into Thai discourse appeared similar to those reported in other parts of the world.