I can't give you a precise linguistic description of what code
switching is. Wiki and the other writeups in this node have a fairly good descriptions at any rate, or at least they
seem good to my untrained eye. But what I can do, is that
I can tell you what code switching feels like.
I can, however, give you a brief and possibly innaccurate explanation
of what it's supposed to be. It's a multilingual phenomenon when a
speaker changes the way they say a word, phrase, or sentence to a
different language but completely adhering at least to the
phonological rules of the other language, often the syntactical and
morphological rules too. It is different from pidgin or creole
languages in that the two different languages do not blend into each
other; rather, the two languages are kept distinctly separate and the
discourse completely switches between the rules of one language or
another, hence the name, code switching.
I suppose my definition is broad enough to admit that a code switcher
may not sound like a native of speaker of any of the languages they
code switch from, but at least I always think of a code switcher as
someone who has more than one native language (like myself, whom I
consider to have English and Spanish as native languages). In my very
unscientific opinion, (remember kids, linguistics is a
science after all), if you aren't a native speaker
of both languages, then you aren't really code switching. It's
different for an L2 speaker to dig around in the vocabulary or
grammar of a different language for an expression not found in the
L1 language, or viceversa, than for a speaker of more than one L1
language to once in a while, even though they're perfectly capable of
restricting themselves to just one language most of the time if they
really need to, to once in a while just feel that one
language or another can express a specific thought in a better way.
Remember that like everything else in our language, there are some
systematic rules on when and how code switching can occur and when and
how it can't. Code switchers develop their own precise grammar, as it
happens with almost all other linguistic phenomena, and it's thus
vulnerable to the same systematic and scientific analysis of the rest
of our language skills.
Now for my personal experience. I acquired my code switching as a
blessing from my parents who managed to give me the best education
that money could buy. Usually when people hear me code switch from
Spanish to English, they assume that I am able to do it because I
lived in an English-speaking country. Well, as a matter of fact I did, but I was able to code switch before I lived
there. I've been able to code switch almost since I've been able to
speak, for I was given two native languages, and I was fully educated
in two native languages, in two cultures. I do not feel like a third
culture kid, but I am close in a way because of the extra language I
was given that most people around me don't have.
As a child, code switching seemed like the most natural thing for me,
and of course it seemed ordinary enough, since all the other students
at my school could do it too. We would speak both languages freely
switching between the two, admittedly sometimes mangling one language
or another due to interference between the two. This is a different
phenomenon from one all too common in many parts of the US with a high
proportion of Spanish-speaking immigrants and colloquially known as
Spanglish, where in some places it's already evolving into creole or
pidgin languages. I remember once in New York state in a bus station
listening to some kids speaking this Spanish-English creole language,
and I had difficulties understanding what they were saying because
they already had a different grammar than either of the languages that
spawned their creole. I do think that within the next couple of
decades we may see a creole language such as this one properly
established in many parts of the US.
But again, code switching is different. My classmates and I didn't
create our own personal private language with different grammatical
rules than the two languages we created it from. I mean, yes, there
are grammatical rules on when and where you can code switch, but the
resulting sentence should be understandable to any speaker of both
languages, not just to other code switchers (well, if written down
anyways, perhaps the mixing of two different phonologies may confuse some listeners). I guess that having
three hours of class in Spanish by a native Spanish speaker followed
by recess and three more hours of class in English by a native English
speaker, and usually exact same subjects too, at least in elementary
school up to grade five, was what prevented me and my classmates from
mangling either language too much. After all, we were forbidden from
addressing our Spanish teacher in English or our English teacher in
Spanish, and supposedly we couldn't talk to each other in a language
different than the class we were in (but yeah, right, I'll dare any
teacher to really enforce that rule). Of course, in recess, in the
playground, any language was free for all. Korean, Japanese,
Portuguese, and French were the most popular alternatives, and perhaps
an expletive in Yiddish, Hebrew, or Arabic now and then for the kids
who still had some vestiges of it in their ancestry.
Middle school and high school were a little different, with everything
in English except the courses that had to be in Spanish (Mexican
history, Spanish etymologies, Latin American literature, that sort of
thing), but it did keep on cementing the notion that there were two
languages and that they were different, and that's how they should
stay. The net result of this is that the other kids like I that stayed
for twelve years in this school, or for a similarly long enough
period, ended up becoming fully bilingual in formal situations and
fervent code switchers in informal ones. We talked to each other
freely code switching from one language to another, now interspersing
a sentence in English amidst Spanish discourse, sometimes doing the
reverse, sometimes only a word, but without ever assimilating an
English word into Spanish phonology nor the reverse. We wrote term
papers in both languages, sometimes confusing the punctuation rules of
one language for the other, and sometimes even charmingly spelling
things like "alphabeto" which in Spanish would be pronounced
"alpabeto" if written like that instead of "alfabeto". All of this
seemed ordinary to me at the time, but now that I recount it, I'm
seeing more and more what a wonderful lifelong gift my parents gave to
my brother and me by giving us a fully bilingual, bicultural education
like that, making the world a little smaller and a little more
digestible for us.
I know that my experience is by no means unique. In places like fully
bilingual Montréal, where a large portion of the population speaks
two languages (60%-70%, as I recall, maybe more) or even three (about
30% of Montrealers speak three languages fluently, as I recall), code
switchers abound. Nevertheless, and again, very unscientifically,
sometimes being a code switcher is a little lonely.
When you're a code switcher, you're a bit of a freak to
everyone. Speakers of the languages you code switch from get a little
envious of your abilities, wishing they could speak the languages as
well as you could. They even chastise themselves for not paying enough
attention in their foreign language classes in school when the fact
remains that all the code switchers I know acquired the skill
effortlessly through the benefit of simply being immersed in more than
one language since childhood. When you're a code switcher, you can't
always find the exact words in one language or another to say what you
want to say, although you can almost always find a good enough
approximation. You can't speak in your most natural state to almost
anyone; you have to rely on the aforementioned
approximations. Sometimes, when someone sees you code switching, you
become a little foreign to them. Being from more than one place
sometimes means you're from nowhere.
Of course, being a code switcher also means that you have at least two
separate worlds and cultures completely at your disposal, that you can
move between one and the other with great ease. It means being able to
understand cross-linguistic puns, and to read several
authors in their respective native languages. It's an amazing gift (in
my case, literally, since it was a gift my parents were able to give
me) that I wouldn't ever trade for monolingualism, even if this meant
that I would be less of a freak. At any rate, most of the time I can
keep my code switching under control, as I am doing now, and stick
entirely to one language or another for the benefit of my audience.
When you get very specific, though, my most natural language
environment is the one I grew up in, with heavy Mexico City slang code
switching back and forth between English. This greatly narrows down
the possibility of fellow code switchers with whom I can feel at
greatest ease. Whenever I meet a girl who code switches from exactly
the same colloquial Mexico City Spanish and English, it is by itself
almost an immediate turn on and makes me want to get down her
pants as soon as possible. If the code switcher is a guy, I feel a
special connection with him too. You're like me! You understand me!
Oddly enough, the precise variety of English isn't as important for
me, no doubt because I never lived as a child in a specific English
environment, having as teachers native English speakers from all over
the world (mostly from the US, but I've had Canadians, Australians,
Brits, and a few from other places too).
I never realised it as a child and teenager, while I was in my little
code switching bubble where most everyone else was like me, and it
seemed like the most natural thing in the world. As I've broken out of
that bubble through the years and stumbled across other code switchers
around the world, I've come to realise how important code switching is
for me and deeply embedded into my identity it is. Bilingualism is
cool, polyglots doubly so, but if you can code switch with me into the
same languages I can, I'll probably fall a little in love
with you.