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I'm reposting this post from the Economist's Johnson blog for bloodstones, who explained code-switching to me a while back, and digitalemur, who more recently asked me to translate Gemütlichkeit.

Mixing languages: Que es ese code-switching?

An excerpt:

"There is no reason to say Weltanschauung for "worldview", unless you just don't get enough chances to type two u's in succession and have tired of writing about vacuums."

The comments are worth a glance, too.

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My former bosses Y and E used to do this all the time with Japanese words. Oddly though, my father never does this with Polish. Although he does often sing a version of "Row Row Row Your Boat" that is a hybrid of Polish and English that was (and maybe still is) sung in the Polish immigrant community of northern NJ.

How many people does your father regularly interact with who are fluent in polish? My understanding is that code switching happens a lot more frequently if there's a community. I saw a talk at a conference a few months ago that suggested code switching was often deeply rooted in community identity, at least in latino communities in the US. As part of a given subculture (there's regional variation) it's expected that everyone will code switch - it's a way of identifying other members of the community, and confirming your own membership.

Also, thanks r_ness, I do love thinking about code switching, and this was funny.

For most of my life, Dad hasn't been around many other Polish speakers. His parents had died by the time I was a toddler, and we moved from northern NJ to southeastern CT, and thus away from a sizeable Polish speaking community, when I was four.

My boss talks about that same pressure to not use English technical jargon in German.

I often say "gracias" or "danke" instead of "thank you", etc, and I don't know why. I shudder to think that it's an affectation and therefore a bad habit rather than an eccentricity. :(

I code-switch with my level of boston accent in my speech. It's almost completely unintentional, too. I think part of it is being with someone who has the accent and part of it is trying to discuss certain subjects or strike a certain conversational mood.

It's been kind of startling to some people who haven't heard my wicked pissah accent.

I'm not sure if this is truly code-switching, but since my son is taking both Spanish and Japanese in school this year, a lot of the short conversational responses are in one or the other of those (e.g., I say, "Go take the trash out," and I get back, "Hai!" as he heads off to do it. But if the response is "Mom, I'm in the middle of this game and it can't pause!" that's always in English.)

I know just enough Spanish that Spanish-language TV drives me *insane*, being neither intelligible enough to fully follow nor ignorable noise to me, and I have a few phrases I tend to drop in ("mijos locos" is a favorite form of address for my children, for instance), but like

browngirl, I suspect this falls more in the realm of affectation.

Oh, I absolutely "catch" accents if I'm around someone with a strong one, whether it's an accent I normally possess or not. When I lived in Michigan, my coworkers could always tell if I'd been talking to my dad on the phone, because his Texas drawl would make mine kick back in for about a day before it faded out again. And I spent a couple of weeks working in Buffalo with a group of people with various British Empire accents (one actual Brit, two Australians, and a Kiwi), and wound up sounding Canadian (to the point where I had a minor debate with the border guard on my way home as to my actual nationality) for about 3 days. I'm afraid it sometimes comes off as mockery, but it's totally subconscious.

I do this, too. I had to be so careful when I was on my honeymoon in Wales, so that people wouldn't think I was mocking them.

My sister, who was born in Germany, was in kindergarten in the US, and had the following exchange:

*teacher shows a picture of a cow* *all the students say, "It's a cow!"*

*teacher shows a picture of a house* *all the students say, "It's a house!"*

*teacher shows a picture of a helicopter* *all the students say, "It's a helicopter!" Except my sister*

*my sister says, "It's a hubschrauber!"* because my folks thought that was a nifty word. And that's what we all learned that that was what those were. Even me, and I was born in the US.

It's the Economist, so I tend to see them as ending up on the priggish side. :)

Hah! That's excellent.

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