Like I speak English and Portuguese, learning Dutch, and (not doing it for the sake of a primarily English-speaking community) but I will often switch between the two, like saying “Bom dia/Oi” to someone or “Tchau!”
I may also falar assim and I don’t do it to show off, it’s just comfortable pra mim. I will mix in a few português words. (Not exactly like this but YKWIM, maybe).
I speak english, italian and arabic. and it’s so much fun to switch between the three with other multi-linguals, personally sometimes i find it hard to switch to english after speaking italian for a long period of time, and when i read english text i tend to pronounce the numbers in italian as it feels much easier and makes more sense for me.
I think it’s overall a fun experience.
Ciao! Parlo anche italiano :)
Are you Maltese by any chance ?
No Mr. Owl, he’s a polar bear
TurkoGerman here and we do that all the time. Our families back in turkey learned enough german by now thay we even do it in turkey…
Same for my tunisian wife (Arabic instead of Turkish though).
In linguistics this is called “code switching”, and it is extremely common among native bilinguals.
Dialects, too.
Saint Louis Public Radio has a show titled Code Switch which is about discussing racism and derives it’s name from the behavior.
My wife and I are constantly switching between English and French when conversing amongst ourselves. I’ve often noted that when we want to emphasize a sentence, we use the others native language. It also comes in handy when in public and we want to convey something in secret, because both of our accents in our mother languages are quite strong, so at a whisper even people who know the language but are not fluent will not grasp what we are saying.
Quite common in India to speak a mix of English and another language. My partner and I mostly speak English, but some sentences just happen in Hindi.
They do that also in Bollywood movies! It was unexpected the first time I hear that!
I’ve been noticing that when I read an English text to someone who also speaks my mother tongue, that I will switch to my mother tongue for reading out numbers. For some reason, it feels pretentious to pronounce it in English.
Yes, that is very normal for multilingual people. It’s called code-switching and it has been intensively studied by linguists.
Being English, I’m stubbornly monolingual (aside from some leftover schoolboy French), so when I was invited to a Sikh wedding I was genuinely amazed by all the guests just flowing between English and Punjabi as if they were the same language.
It’s not just them, a lot of people across the world speak a mix of english and their native tongue.
Even seen philipino subs coming to the reddit front page? They usually start with an English phrase and end in tagalog.
I remember a subreddit called “Belgicaans”. It’s basically a place where we would converse in sentences that combined our three native languages (Dutch, French and German). Was very funny to do actually! But speaking like that? No, never
Frequently mix my native and second language and sometimes can’t think of a good enough word in my native language. Rarely mix my third language except when speaking to people of that country or in that country.
Yes, my mother tongue is English, and I spoke some Spanish before I began immersing in Italian. At one point, I couldn’t stop speaking ItalSpanGlish. Nobody could understand me.
I’m bilingual English and Mandarin and I mostly do this in Chinese restaurants. The real hole in the wall places with the best Chinese food where the servers greet you in Mandarin by default if you look Chinese. Mandarin is more “computationally” expensive for my brain because I’m so used to speaking English so as soon as I have to express something complex I’ll just blurt it out in English instead of stuttering it out in Mandarin, which prompts an English response from the server, and we’ll go back and fourth switching between the two languages.
Yes, every mac madra does this
Same, (in that I speak both Portuguese and English) and that I do sometimes feel the need to jump around
Olá!
I’ve only ever heard this in American movies by hispanic characters. To me, it would feel extremely pretentious to do this in real life
