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?
