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.
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).
White washed (westernised) Arabs do usually speak in a specific language but substitute specific words in the other language
I really hate this though as it causes the speaker to only know each word in one of the language which basically means they can speak neither properlythen their is that third language in whatsapp, where they use english and numbers to spell out Arabic words
Totally agreed, but that doesn’t only apply to arabs, as I personally notice a lot of italians (for example) doing it (mixing english with italian), and for both the motives are different whether it is globalization, colonization or the famous sense of western and/or white supermacy.
Personally i only do code switching with other multi-linguals, but other than that it would only seem pretentious and not very polite.
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.
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.
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.
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’ve only ever heard this in American movies by hispanic characters. To me, it would feel extremely pretentious to do this in real life
Yes, that is very normal for multilingual people. It’s called code-switching and it has been intensively studied by linguists.
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 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
Not the same thing, but just the other day I accidentally started speaking French in the middle of a conversation in Spanish, and it took me a minute to understand why the guy suddenly couldn’t understand me
English, Spanish (Spanglish too), and a bit of French. I like to cambiar lenguajes dans le middle of une phrase
Yes, every mac madra does this
