Code switching refers to “alternation between one or more languages, dialects, or language registers in the course of discourse between people who have more than one language in common.
” Anyone who lives in a multicultural urban area has most likely witnessed this phenomenon. If you are polylingual you have most likely code switched at some point in a conversation with another person with two languages in common. Living in Ottawa, the national capital of a multicultural country, I am likely to overhear conversations in, at the bare minimum, two languages throughout my day. Often this number raises as high as six or seven different languages. Therefore, as you can guess, I hear a lot of code switching in the course of an average day.
I recently have made several observations about the relative frequencies of intersentential and intrasentential code switching. Intersentential code switching, where the code switch happens between sentences or thoughts seems to happen more with speakers of Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan languages. Intrasentential code switching, where the switch happens within a thought, tends to happen more with speakers of Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European languages.
It is my belief that the disparate syntactical structures of Indo-European versus Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan languages makes intrasentential code switching prohibitively difficult except in single word code switches. I have observed that these linguistic groups generally code switch when the subject changes to a person who speaks the secondary language, at a change of participants, at location changes, and when discussing current events.
Intrasentential code switching is something that Canadians are all accustomed to. Anglophone Canadians will often state something and complete it with a “n’est pas?” We will often discuss someone possessing a certain “je ne sais quois.” Although our code switching is certainly not limited to the occasional word. It is common for fluently bilingual Canadians to intersententially code switch back and forth from French to English regardless of the mother tongue of either participant.
I think that large scale code switching environments (such as Ottawa) are conducive to the growth and change of the English language. English, being the largely common element here in Ottawa, and being as flexible as it is ends up amalgamating commonly code switched words from other languages. I believe this phenemonon must occur in any large multicultural city.
Interesting research in code switching is used for determining ethnolinguistic vitality, understanding the needs of polylingual societies, researching bilingualism, and, of course, keeping amateur linguists entertained.
Tags: bilingualism · linguistics · social sciences1 Comment
Interesting observations. I’ve of course seen bilingual “code switching” on almost a daily basis, but I never really thought about it on that level.
When I code-switch within the three languages I speak with a relative degree of fluency (English, French, Spanish), it is always because the thought which has not yet become language is more easily expressed in one language than another. “Esta muy cabron” works a lot better than “It’s very cool in a tough kind of way”.
That’s nothing new added to what you already said (“a certain je ne sais quoi” example); I’ve just never had occasion to really think about the times that I’ve code-switched in conversation myself.