What do you think about code-switching?

[William Camden]

A lot of the time it is inevitable in a multilingual environment. However, it can be a sign of language shift, possibly resulting in the ultimate replacement of a language by another more widely spoken or powerful one.
A related phenomenon is macaronic literature or songs, sometimes with the body of the songs in one language and the refrain in another.

[Stelle]

I grew up code-switching. It wasn't good or bad, it was just the way that we naturally communicated.

I lived in a bilingual city, in a bilingual family (two parents, two languages), went to school in one language, read books in another language, had friends and cousins of either or both languages. English was definitely my main native language outside of school, but French was everywhere. We would code-switch constantly without really thinking about it.

It used to drive my Dad crazy if we did it mid-sentence, though! I still remember the look he gave me when I was telling him about how my friend was almost hit on the road: "Le truck l'a presque rammée!"

That said, the people who code-switched were probably mostly minority language speakers (French speakers, which made up 40ish% of the population). French-speakers tended to also speak English, and do some code-switching, while most English-speakers didn't speak much French. In their defense, there was a bit of animosity on the part of some French-speakers, and they weren't always the most welcoming people to practise with. There was also some animosity on the part of some English-speakers, who felt resentful that many jobs required bilingualism (well...duh). Anyway, it was a very interesting place to grow up!

Even now, I code-switch regularly with my colleagues, some of whom are more comfortable in English and some of whom are more comfortable in French. Any one-on-one conversation will generally use one language only, but as soon as there are three or more people in the room, the language is likely to flow naturally from French to English and back to French again. We use whichever language is best for communicating, which - in my opinion - is the whole point of language.

Being a person who code-switches naturally, I'm not sure that it's worthwhile to put any value on it, negative or positive. It just sort of is.

[DaveBee]

Watching a video from the polyglot gathering: The challenges of translating over 140 different languages. The speaker is from a language learning software producer called uTalk, who as I understand it have an english template that they then translate to 140 languages.

In one african language (chichewa?) it is apparently routine to switch to english when using numbers, just because the native speakers find their own language's system too wordy. (15m46s into the video)

[Systematiker]

As someone else has noted, it kind of “just is”, but it’s also neat. Before we were more careful (small children and language establishing), my wife and I would switch and mix a lot. We share five strong spoken languages, so it wasn’t even uncommon to manage three or four changes in longer sentences.

Some domains are always in one language or another, though.

[William Camden]

My ideal world, linguistically speaking, probably existed 100 years ago. A world in which English wasn’t seemingly practically everwhere (or at least not all over Europe), and each culture was not influenced to the extent it is today by a global homogenized, pateurized, multi-national, downloadable culture.

1917? You might need to go further back.

Actually for many countries in Europe, French was in 1917 what English is today. It influenced a lot my native language Romanian. It was the language of the elites. Now it's clearly second way bellow English.

French a hundred years ago was not as dominant in Europe as English is now - for example, depending on which part of Europe, both German and Russian also served as a lingua franca. Before and up to the start of WW1, Lenin was living in exile on Polish-speaking territory in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He learned little or no Polish (one report mentions his wife having a better grasp of the language) but interacting with Polish socialists was usually possible through the medium of German. In fact German was dominant in Central Europe as an L2 if not an L1 - a biographer of Kafka mentioned a Prague academic known to Kafka who specialised in English literature and noted that this was rather exotic at that time, because German was culturally dominant in the region for those who did not rely on the Czech language.

[DaveBee]

In multi-lingual people perhaps some concepts are stored in one language rather than all languages?

I like this explanation.

As part of the 6 week challenge I'm making myself listen to some Bengali radio interviews. These have a presenter and someone being interviewed. I've noticed different interviewees use different amounts of English. I just heard a sports interview, and there was a lot of English - my impression is this was due to the topic, drug doping, which they've probably discussed and heard about in English many times. In the science programmes I've heard the person interviewed is usually American/English, and so there's a translator. The presenter/interviewer and translator use only Bengali, but the Bengali-speaking interviewees, to varying degrees, speak by combining Bengali and English.

On another thread Reineke linked to an article that seems relevant:

What the researchers find, time and again, is that the first language of these bilinguals is more likely to trigger memories of childhood events and the country of origin, and the second language memories of events that took place later in life.

These findings suggest that our languages and memories are integrated in two interesting ways. On the one hand, language used during particular events becomes a stable property or ‘tag’ of autobiographical memories – when we recall events in the language in which they took place they come to memory faster and in more detail, as seen in Nabokov’s Other shores. This does not mean, of course, that memories encoded in one language are inaccessible in another – we can translate our memories, as Nabokov did, yet something may be ‘lost in translation’.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/li ... ual-memory

[mick33]

I agree with Tarvos, code-switching just is. If that's how people speak then that's how I will speak too, though I've no doubt she has more experience with this than I do.

Do you speak a language that code-switches a lot? Any tricks for dealing with it, or do you just go with the flow?

When I read this, my first thought wasn't about languages where code-switching is common, but countries. South Africa seems to be a place where code-switching and other forms of language mixing happen a lot. I remember listening to an interview on a South African radio station that was at first a mixture of Afrikaans and English which I could follow easily, once I adjusted to hearing both languages used equally. However as the interview continued the speakers added in words, phrases and even whole sentences in what I think was Xhosa and I understood very little. I just went with the flow and didn't worry about what I didn't understand.

[reineke]

Some profanity.

[Sarafina]

Practically every Nigerian I know code-switches. Because English is the official language of Nigeria. Any form of higher education is taught in English. Interesting enough I spent the first eight years of my life in Nigeria and I never had to speak Yoruba. I could understand it perfectly because my grandparents spoke it around it and just generally osmosis. All the cartoons I watched were American cartoon thus in English. Same with the movies. During school, my classmates and I spoke only in English.

Sadly it's becoming common for middle-class parents to deliberately refuse to speak any of their native languages to their children out of a misplaced fear that it will negatively affect their English. Even my cousins ,who have lived in Nigeria their whole lives, can only speak basic Yoruba.

Although books in Yoruba do exist, I never encountered one. The most well-known Nigerian authors write in...as you guessed English even though they do speak an indigenous Nigerian language such as Igbo or Yoruba.

Ask a Nigerian adult who is fluent in both English and Yoruba and ask them to list all the colours in Yoruba. After white, black, red they start to struggle. Because apart from black and white I have never heard anyone say colours like purple in Yoruba. Because a lot of people were taught colours in English.

Even in more rural village, code-switching is common although it's more pidgin English mixed with their own Native language.

[basica]

My parents aren't native speakers of English so I grew up in an environment that code switches (unfortunately I think this was the beginning of the end of my Serbian as a kid). I worked with a few Indian guys earlier in my career and they would code switch between 3 or 4 languages at a time; sometimes more depending on who was there. I think it's pretty normal.

Like Peter, I am bit of a purist and it bothers me more than it probably should to see the intrusion of English everywhere. I get that this has happened historically with other languages but it was more isolated and had far less impact than English. I had a friend live in Norway for a while and it took a concerted effort on his part to learn Norwegian since English is used so heavily there by younger folk who think it's trendy.

Hell, I was watching a YouTube video the other day in Norwegian and I was surprised how many English words were used. I felt like I had an A2 level in Norwegian because I pretty much understood the entire video based on the English words This kind of thing is only getting worse as more and more people prefer English over their own language as mentioned previously. In particular with online communication. I think in the next 10 or 20 years it's going to be hard to find forums and the like in languages outside of English because of this push; and that'll be a shame.