Seo é a blog post about code-switching

Mallorey Fennessy

I grew up in a multilingual household. We speak between us a total of five different languages (French, English, Irish Gaelic, Farsi (Persian), and German) and all of us speak at least two fluently. As you can guess we tend to switch around languages quite often. It’s not too uncommon to hear me yell something upstairs along the lines “Loic, Cá bhfuil tu? Get down here, J’suis dans le cuisine!” Now if you need a translation, I’m hardly surprised, because in that one sentence I simultaneously spoke Irish, English and French. I was asking my brother, Loic, Cá bhfuil tu? Or in English Where are you? Switched to English and then switched to French, by telling him I’m in the kitchen all in one sentence.

This linguistic phenomenon has been dubbed Code-Switching or Code-Mixing and was typically attributed to sub-standard language and was often said to have little consistency, however in the last fifty years it has been properly studied. Recent studies show various factors influence code switching such as social context, emotional charge, levels of language proficiency, and relationship with the recipient.

Social context is quite an obvious factor,  Gumperez (1964) and Hernándas-Chavez (1972) studied Mexican-American families and the situations they code-switched in households where all household members spoke both English and Spanish. They both found that when talking about topics outside the home, families spoke English, and personal affair were spoken in Spanish, often switching from one to the other.

Emotional charge also holds a factor as changing language halfway through a sentence can often occur for emphasis. This one is very prevalent between my mum and I, especially if we are joking about someone or something, as the utterance really stands out. Alternatively my mum will tell me off in English, and once she switches to French I really know I’ve got on her bad side.

I speak better in Gaelic than I do in English and my brother speaks better English than Gaelic, this often results in me speaking to him primarily in Irish with spurts of English vocabulary or phrases to get the point across to him, sometimes certain phrases are better to express certain ideas, those phrases often happen to in a different language but they pop up anyway.

In a grammatical sense, descriptive words and phrases often tend to the ones that get the switch. Toribo (1978) found that amongst Latino children in Arizona, that adjectives and especially colours were most code-switched. Function words also tended to be changed quite often with prepositions and determiners making a large percentage of the change.

While not too much is known about the mechanics of code-switching, táim ábalta (I’m able) to say that it is a very interesting phenomenon in today’s multi-cultural world where bilingualism is quite prevalent I think it is sábháilte a rá (safe to say) that it will be better understood and will no longer be perceived as the nonsensical phenomenon it once was.

 

 

 

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