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).
Have a relative who has another language as their mother tongue but has perfect of my native language so we code switch a lot, I’m not fluent but I enjoy throwing in bits of what I know and they seem to appreciate it and encourage it
Weirdly, I kind of like parts of their language so I have lots of fun with wordplay and playing with the spelling and such and mashing them together for comedic effect like Sacha Baron Cohen does in Bruno
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!
Yes, eng fr spa, mix all sorts of words together or use gendered words ungendered when using them in English
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
No.
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).
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.
Can relate
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.
Was the wedding fun? Anything funny happen?
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.
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, that is very normal for multilingual people. It’s called code-switching and it has been intensively studied by linguists.
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
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 properlyTotally 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.
then their is that third language in whatsapp, where they use english and numbers to spell out Arabic words
English, Spanish/Spanglish, and a bit of French. Parfois, I like to cambiar idiomas dans le middle of une phrase to mess with mes amigos. But yes I always mix up things. The most common is when I accidentally inject Spanish into French
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.
