Code Switching and Pidgin: Where Does One Draw the Line?

Code switching is a topic within linguistics which has always fascinated me. Perhaps this is because it is arguably the linguistic topic discussed in this class which I can most readily see in my life. My father is a native English and French speaker. His parents immigrated to the United States before he was born, and early on in life they had relatively poor command over the English Language. Throughout childhood and into the present day, my father always speaks to his family in a mixture of French and of English. My Grandparents will say something to my father in French, only for him to respond in English with some French words mixed in. He might then say something in French with his parents responding back to him in English. It's a very interesting concept and one which I have also been exposed to in one of my friends' households. 

My friend Matan immigrated with his family to the United States, from Israel, when he was 7 or 8. His mother is from Reunion Island, a French colony, and his father was born and raised in Israel. At home, Matan and his family speak in a perplexing mish-mash of Hebrew, English, and French, with individual sentences containing features of all three languages. Surely you can imagine that this combination of languages is very strange to listen to. 

Additionally, growing up in Southern California I’ve been exposed to a great deal of spanish on a near daily basis. Though I’ve never formally studied Spanish, I find that my speech, and the speech of many people around me, borrows loan words from Spanish on a fairly regular basis. For example I might great a friend using “Hola” or say goodbye using “adios” or I might say “Menana” when referring to tomorrow and so on. This type of code switching is less intense, for lack of a better term, then the other forms I mentioned prior but it is code-switching nevertheless.

But perhaps the most intense form of code switching I personally experience on a day to day basis is that which I use at my job at Good Choice Sushi. Most of the staff at my restaurant is either Japanese or Hispanic, with some of the servers being standard English-speaking Americans such as myself. With many of my co-workers having worked in the restaurant for a very long time, many of the Japanese staff speak perfect Spanish and many of the Hispanic staff can use a surprising amount of Japanese. Therefore, in the workplace, there is an incredible mix between Spanish, Japanese, and English. Generally speaking, at its core, conversation is held in English but with very frequent Spanish and Japanese phrases or loan words. For example, when referring to a bill we generally either call it the “Oaiso” (the Japanese equivalent). When ordered to tell the chef to prepare more tempura shrimp, we will often send an order to the back requesting “mas camarones por favor.” These examples might appear small, but these are only examples which I can recall. Many of my co-workers communicate in really good Spengapanese, using a lot of features from japanese and Spanish in their speech rather than relying as much on the English as I do. To me, this begs the question of whether or not this is actually code switching. What begs this question is the regularity of borrowed vocabulary in their speech, with them using the same words for the same things (for example, they generally don’t alternate between camarones and shrimp but rather they regularly only use camarones). Perhaps this example isn’t code switching. Perhaps it is rather the development of a Pidgin language. And frankly, where does one draw the distinction?

Russianness in the Post-Soviet Block

This year, I decided to study the Russian Language. I have always been, at the very least, marginally interested in Russian society and Russian culture, I find the language to be beautiful sounding, and I found its features to be sufficiently complex (and interesting). But one of the reasons I decided to study Russian was because of how polarizing the language is in large parts of the Earth today. The Russian Language is polarizing in North America because of the aftereffects of the Cold War, and because of recent allegations of Russian collusion in North American elections; the Russian Language is polarizing in Western Europe because of the influence of Russian oil and of Russian oligarchs in places like London or Berlin, and the Russian Language is polarizing in Eastern Europe because of the lasting legacy of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe, and most recently because of the annexation of the Crimean Penninsula in 2014.

The history of Crimea is long and complex. The Penninsula has exchanged hands between Greeks, Italians, Tartars (Turkic nomads), and Slavs (of Russian and of Ukrainian stock) countless times throughout history. The Russian empire incorporated Crimea after a war with the Turkish Ottoman Empire, after which the demographics of the peninsula would shift to Russian after decades of resettlement. The Russian Black Sea fleet was based out of Crimea, and Crimea became a place as Russian as any other part of Russia. Then, things changed, when under Soviet control the Crimean Penninsula was given to the Ukrainian SSR as a gift to celebrate 400 years of Ukrainian incorporation within Russia; this move was intended to be purely ceremonial and no one foresaw that in a few short decades the Soviet Union would collapse and Crimea would join a freshly independent Ukraine.

Despite joining Ukraine, Crimea and the rest of Eastern Ukraine remains predominately Russian. Russian is spoken as the native language of the vast majority of Crimeans and Eastern Ukrainians, therefore many of them choose to identify with the nationality tied to their language rather than the nationality tied to their nation. This is what essentially gave Vladimir Putin the confidence to annex the Crimean Penninsula, and to start a civil war between East and West within Ukraine, because he knew that the Crimean people wouldn't resist Russian expansion into their country.

Anecdotally speaking, I have more evidence to back this up. Yulia Belopolsky, my Russian professor, is from Crimea and affectionally reflects upon the annexation of Crimea as the time when Crimea "returned to Russia." Additionally, my Russian history Professor last year reflected on his friends' experience in 2014 when they were visiting Kazakhstan and heard people marching through the streets yelling, "Crimea is ours!" as the news spread that Russia had annexed Crimea. This offers some interesting insight as to how the post-soviet block views itself in relation to Russia. A lot of people, it would seem, in post-soviet countries across Eurasia still feel a close affinity to Russian culture and to the Russian language. People still identify with their former Russianness despite having been politically isolated from Russia for decades now, demonstrating the lasting impact language has on how one views themselves. Nationality has a very close relationship with language, and one is likely to identify with the people who are like them and share their language before they group themselves with another group of people with whom they might share a nation but not a language.

Online Language Learning SUCKS!

We have all had a very, very, very busy week or two. A lot of us traveled for Spring Break, and then we were all informed that we would be expected to return home as quickly as possible after our break, due to the hastily spreading Corona Virus (COVID-19). We quickly said goodbye to those friends and colleagues that we could, before being ushered off-campus by our parents. But alas, it gets worse: not only do we miss out on spending time with many of our friends and loved ones, but now we are being told to continue classes digitally from the security of our own homes. Being forced to take online classes is a huge bummer for most students, but it is even worse than it might first seem for those of us who are studying a foreign language.

Learning a foreign language is really hard work, especially when you're just starting. Those of us who decided to start learning a new foreign language this year find ourselves buried in the complexities of grammar, learning pronunciation, learning to read and write, and learning basic vocabulary. The difficulties we experience are compounded by the difficulty in picking up a new foreign language and the difficulty in transitioning to an online environment in which instructor feedback is less in-depth. This is sure to dampen the language learning experience and limit the benefits of learning a new foreign language. Without a doubt, students are going to struggle to keep up with rapidly ongoing new content and with students being scattered across different time zones, students are having to make massive adjustments to ordinary life in order to accommodate for their new schedules. Worst of all, students are losing access to their professors and to each other, decreasing access to practice materials with practices like simple oral or listening drills being much harder to coordinate.

Language learning is by definition not a passive process, it takes a lot of time, motivation, and practice in order to excel. The problem with moving classes online for foreign language students is that it affects how much time you can put in, it can diminish motivation, and it makes practicing much more difficult; it takes an active learning process and makes it pacific. This is dangerous for a foreign language learner, as it makes it much easier to fall behind, the effect of which being that catching back up will only become harder and harder the further behind you fall. It is unfortunate that we have to be put in such a situation, but of course, it goes without saying that we have no other choice given the rate at which COVID-19 is spreading. It is important to stay safe and to stay indoors, despite the difficulties that might pose on your language learning journey, and at the end of the day if you are dedicated and passionate enough about your foreign language of choice the hurtles presented to you today will be easily surmountable.

Language or Dialect? And Whats the Difference?

Just like the rest of us, the creation of my Essay 2 Language Research Paper is well under-way. In my paper, I am looking at different features of different languages in order to better understand what makes certain languages more difficult to learn. One such language I am looking at is the Arabic Language. What makes the Arabic language so notoriously difficult to learn?

There are a number of reasons why Arabic is such a hard language to learn; two of the main reasons I've discovered are the divergent nature of Arabic dialects from one another, and the difficulty non-native speakers face when reading the unstressed vowels in Arabic writing.

When learning Arabic, generally students have to learn the standard variety of Arabic called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA is very distinct from most of the modern dialects of Arabic; it is based on Biblical Arabic whereas the other forms of Arabic are simply based on the Arabic spoken in a given region (the Levant, Egypt, Gulf, North Africa, or Iraq just to name a few places associated with a dialect). The different dialects vary greatly from one another, and from MSA in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, and inflection. This begs the question then, if the different forms of Arabic can vary so greatly from one another, why are they all considered to be the same language instead of different languages?

The dialects of which the modern Arabic language consists all share a common lineage in Quranic Arabic (which is very similar to MSA, which is still used today). This strikes me as being similar to how French, Spanish, and Italian all share a common lineage in Vulgar Latin. French, Spanish, and Italian exist on a linguistic continuum, meaning that speakers of all three languages can understand one another to varying degrees based on natural proximity to one another; this is similar to the relationship between all the different modern dialects of Arabic. The different Romance Languages spoken in Western Europe today share similar vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but as you travel around the areas in which these languages are spoken you can clearly see vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation shift from country to country, or from municipality to municipality; and the same is true with the modern dialects of Arabic. So why are Spanish, French, and Italian considered languages but all the dozens of varieties of Arabic are considered one language? This comes down to the way in which languages are defined by linguistics.

In the field of modern linguistics, there is no one universal, solid definition for what exactly a language is. As in biology with the classifications of Organisms, in linguistics, the dividing lines between languages are totally arbitrary. Something is considered a language because enough people all decide it fits the broad, negotiable criteria suited to define a language. Arabic is considered one language and not several because it is what Arabic speakers, and linguists, have decided to believe. French, Spanish, and Italian are all different languages, again, because it is a commonly held belief. The dividing lines between languages and dialects are totally subjective, and can easily be argued in the present and renovated throughout time.

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When in Rome

Before last weekend, I had been to exactly 25 of the 50 States in the United States of America. Since then, I have been to exactly 27 of the 50 States in the United States of America. 

Last weekend, I went on a canvassing trip with about a dozen of my colleagues at AU through Virginia and North Carolina to Rock Hill, South Carolina. I was beyond excited leading up to the trip, as I have always wanted to explore the South Eastern United States but had never managed to make it much further than Southern Virginia. The night we drove down, my friends and I had a late dinner at Waffle House then went to sleep, only to wake up bright and early so we could start knocking on some doors. The culture shock was, to put it simply, rather evident when speaking with Southerners of mostly African American heritage, living in lower-middle-class neighborhoods. What was shocking to me was how differently people spoke in the South, but what was even more shocking to me still was how differently I spoke in the South.

My speech transitioned a great deal over the course of my trip. After my first couple of hours knocking on doors, I noticed myself greeting others very politely, using words like "Ma'am", "Sir", "Mr.", and "Miss" instead of addressing people by less formal nouns or pronouns. By the end of my first day knocking on doors, I noticed myself throwing the word "y'all" into my speech, and as the weekend progressed I noticed myself slurring my speech in an increasingly Southern fashion. 

This is obviously a form of code-switching, and it connects to a greater theme I have noticed myself falling into when I find myself in a foreign environment. When I was visiting Quebec for a French class trip in 2017, I stayed with a host family and noticed myself—on top of speaking more French—speaking English with a slight Quebecois accent with my host family.

When we are surrounded by people of a different background than us, we choose to try and make ourselves appear more familiar by adopting elements of speech we would not normally put on. This seemed especially apparent while I visited the South, as I feel that I (and fellow Yankees around me) embodied this idea of pronunciational mirroring to a great extent. This same concept can have more permanent implications to a persons speech when the individual is exposed to a foreign pronunciation for an extended period of time. 

My grandfather was born in England in 1945 but then immigrated to Southern California at the age of six. After living in the United States for a few years, he (and his older siblings) quickly lost their English accents. Then, when he was in his late 50s, my grandfather moved to Connecticut and now, after almost two decades, has definitely picked up the very real Connecticut accent. This demonstrates how exposure to a foreign form of a language can quickly cause someone to drop characteristics of their indigenous dialect, either for a short period of time or permanently. 

The Alphabet: An Underrated Blessing from Antiquity

       The concept of an 'Alphabet' is one that we take for granted. Considering the fact that most of the world today uses some form of an alphabet (including languages as distinct as Korean, Russian, Indian, and English), and that there are a lot of different alphabets (such as the Romance, Cyrillic, Greek, and Arabic alphabets), it is easy to ignore the reality of how rare alphabets actually are. Every single alphabet (except the Korean Alphabet) has a common origin within one original alphabet, the Phoenician Alphabet.

      The Phoenician Alphabet was invented by a civilization that occupied what is now Israel, Lebanon, and Syria but happily colonized the rest of the Mediterranean spreading trade as they went. The Phoenicians would come into contact with various other groups, including the Arabs, and Indian people-groups, who would adopt the Phoenician writing system but would adapt it for their languages (This is where we get the Arabic script and the Sanskritic script).

      The Greeks would come into contact with Phoenicians and would adopt their trade partners' writing system, but with some sizable differences. For one, the Greeks would write left to right unlike the Phoenicians, and they would modify some Phoenician characters. Later, the Romans would come into contact with the Greeks, and they would take the Greek alphabet and use it with some minor changes to its characters. This was the birth of the Roman script or the script in which we write today.

       Later, the Greek Byzantines would send missionaries to Eastern Europe and Russia. These missionaries would teach the local Slavs to write, using a modified version of the Greek alphabet suited for Slavic pronunciation, creating a new alphabet called the Cyrillic Alphabet.

       The concept of the alphabet is rare and unnatural, just as was the conception of the wheel, or the sail. The concept of the alphabet is an invention from early civilization that has defined all advancements in western society behind it, becoming a staple in how people in the west understand written language. It is a concept that I, as a college student, am fronted with on a near minutely basis on my laptop, on my phone, and on my professor's smartboard. Words are a necessity of life in the 21st century, and behind them is 5000 years of history dating back to one simple discovery that changed the world.

Romanian: A Linguistic Mish-Mash Like English

My cousin flew into Washington DC this week for a business trip. He brought his wonderful girlfriend with him, and the three of us met up for dinner on Sunday. My Cousin's girlfriend, Diana, is of Romanian heritage; both of her parents left Romania after the overthrow of Romania's Communist Dictator in 1989. She is a heritage speaker of Romanian and I enjoy asking her about Romanian vocabulary. But at dinner on Sunday I got a little bit carried away in my questioning and went a little bit too into detail for her to follow: "How much Slavic influence do you notice in Romanian." She, not having much knowledge of linguistics or a Slavic language responded to me by saying, "None, its a romance language."

What Diana didn't realize is that yes, Romanian is, without doubt, a Romance Language, closely related to Italian, French, and Spanish, but unlike the other three languages which have developed away from Vulgar Latin in contact with one another, Romanian was isolated from the Romance Language Family and has adopted a flair all in its own both by adopting characteristics of the languages it is surrounded by and also by maintaining features of Latin which disappeared in Western Romance Languages. 

For example, Romanian has maintained three noun cases from the Latin grammatical case system. Modern Romanian maintains a dative, vocative, and nominative case whereas all other modern Romance Languages have lost this feature that was present in Latin. Additionally, Romanian maintains three grammatical cases (Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter) just like Latin. Romanian also maintains a large amount of Latin based vocabulary, and here are some examples I was able to find through Google Translate: 

English:       Romanian:      Spanish:      Latin:

Red              Rosu               Roja             Rubrum

House          Casa               Casa             Casa (or Domum)

Hand           Mana              Mano            Manibus

Language    Limba            Lengua          Lingua

Although Romanian maintains a lot of features from its Romance roots, there is also a great deal of borrowed vocabulary from the Slavic Languages which nearly surround Romania with Romanian. The word for 'yes' in Romanian is 'da' as it is in Russian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, and Polish. The Romanian word for 'car' is 'mashina' just as it is in Russian and the Romanian word for 'coat' is 'palt' which is rather similar to the Russian word 'Palto.' A lot of Romanians most sophisticated vocabulary stems from a Slavic source, insinuating the elevated status that speakers of Slavic languages must have had over Romanian speakers. In fact, the cross between Slavic and Romance features in Romanian is very reminiscent of English, a Germanic language that has adopted a lot of its sophisticated vocabulary from a Latin (French) source. It also reminds me of Russian, a language that has plenty of French and German influences on its sophisticated vocabulary. 

Evidently, Romania has borrowed a lot from its Slavic neighbors, making Romanian a very interesting cross between two the Europes most prominent language families. It is a perfect example of how languages can change over time based on contact with other groups of people.