In my family, we jabber away in two languages, using both
English and Spanish interchangeably. Fluent
in both, it is easy for us to substitute words, phrases, and clauses in one or
the other language.
We don’t notice what we do because to us the two are easy on
our tongue. In our brain they are one.
Someone will ask a question in English and get an answer in
Spanish. Someone will make a joke in
Spanish and all the rejoinders will be a mix of both languages. Gossip about a
relative is discussed at great length in both English and Spanish and no one
notices, except for those who get caught in the middle of our barrage and speak
only one of the two. Even then, they are able to keep up because it’s like
listening to one side of a phone conversation.
This phenomenon among fluent
speakers of two or more languages is called code switching. It is a natural
linguistic outcome when they share a similar syntax or phonology, like English
and Spanish, but it is not unique to just these two languages. To code switch,
the correct words, phrases, clauses,
or sentences in compound structures must be interchanged according to the correct grammatical rules that exist between
the two.
Code switching is not Spanglish – where a third “language” is
created by defiling the two. When someone
adds the letter “o” to the ending of a word in English or when a Spanish noun
or verb ending is added to an English word to make it sound like Spanish, that
is Spanglish, words like parquear for to park (a car), carro for car, troca for
truck, marketa for market, lonche for lunch, tochar for to touch, etc.
Spanglish words are not correct in either language and someone
who uses these is not code switching, but attempting (poorly) to speak in Spanish.
I love to eavesdrop on people who are code switching. It is so easy and so natural for them. They are unaware that their brain is dancing between
English and Spanish and that they are creating one language out of two.
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