I’m just watching the tv show ‘Power’ and one thing they do in that, which I’ve seen in countless other shows and movies, is the bilingual characters switching between Spanish and English mid sentence, and back again… is this a thing?
So picture a scene with two people arguing in English… then randomly, person A will shout something in Spanish… person B will respond in Spanish… and this will continue for a few seconds, before returning back to English.
It feels like something that won’t happen in real life… but does it, ever?
I definitely do it in Polish when speaking with my parents. I hear it at my children’s daycare which is Spanish and English. Pretty normal for multilingual folk, in my observation.
I can’t speak Spanish so can’t say for sure, but this is something that happens very often in bilingual or quasi-bilingual situations.
My relatives switch back and forth between Tamil and English (sometimes interspersing Tamil and English words in the same sentence), and in Madagascar people commonly do the same thing with French and Malagasy.
I’ve see this countless times in South Africa, where people fluent in both English and Afrikaans would use them interchangeably, often switching mid sentence.
This one is about changing dialects depending on your audience, a type of code switching also called changing register.
Story told before, but I’m feeling too lazy to search for it:
Grad school, Miami. Talking on the hallway with another grad student, me from Spain, he from Costa Rica. It was a very short hallway, its only door to the office of an Anglo professor. We were talking in Spanish until the professor turned the bend, at which point we switched in mid-sentence. He went into his office and closed the door, we switched back. He opened the door: English. Closed it: Spanish. Opened it (English) and turned the bend (Spanish). He poked his head back out and asked “why and how do you do that?” “Uh? Do what?” For us, not speaking in front of someone in a language he doesn’t understand was so automatic we hadn’t even thought about it.
Absolutely common from Hispanic bilinguals. I lived in Mexico for 11 years and the habit is called being “pocho”. It’s not considered negative or insulting, just a way of talking by people who have to use both languages often, especially those who work in the tourism industry. Sounds funny though, eh ?
Almost everyone I know who is multilingual constantly switches back and forth. I have heard conversations among my relatives in India that mixed four languages in a single sentence.
I am curious as to why the OP doubted that this is common in real life.
Attending conferences in Computer Science, I’d hear stuff like this quite a bit. Two (for example) Israelis are talking about stuff in Hebrew and dropping into English for a bit when it gets technical and then back to Hebrew.
My grandfather came off the boat from Greece. You can tell how little English he spoke looking at his immigration form. He used blocky English letters and misspelled literally every line on the form, including his own name (he didn’t know how to write “John” in English so he wrote Gohn).
My father spoke Greek until he went to kindergarten, at which point he was forced to learn English. My grandfather passed away before I was born, but my grandmother tended to speak mostly in Greek with some occasional English words. The younger generations speak more English than Greek. My father married an English woman so my sister and I grew up speaking English exclusively. Holidays and family gatherings were a weird mix of English and Greek words, with the older folks speaking almost all Greek and the younger folks speaking more English than Greek. A lot of it was exactly like the OP, except Greek instead of Spanish. You’d often have half of a sentence in Greek and half in English.
I worked in my uncle’s restaurant when I was in high school. We all spoke English for the most part, but we’d swear at each other in Greek. That generally wasn’t a problem for the English speaking customers, but when Greek-speaking friends or relatives would come into the restaurant they’d sometimes be a bit shocked at the words that were coming out of the kitchen. We eventually learned to be a little aware of who was in the restaurant before we let the Greek curse words fly.
Incidentally, there’s a Greek word, μαλακα (malaka), that is generally translated as “wanker”, but in Greek it means a bit more than that. While it technically is calling someone a wanker, it’s more like “you are the lord king of all wankers, there are few people who can wank as well as you do”. It’s a bit more severe than its english equivalent. It’s a great swear word to hurl at someone.
(Note - most of our swear words were said to each other in jest - we actually all got along very well together even when working)
It gets referred to as Taglish (Tagalog/English) in the Phillipines. You can get away with linguistic murder over there and most people will still get you. Its pretty typical to hear conversations sprinkled with english words. Then again there is a degree of that with borrowed french words in english too.
I was wondering that myself. And, as Nava mentions in her anecdote, it’s not particularly conscious. I know it would bemuse my wife a bit when we’d all be at my parents’ dinner table having a conversation and I’d turn to her to ask her opinion or input on the topic being discussed and she would look at me and say, “you know, half/most of that was in Polish, and I don’t speak Polish.” Oops. Most commonly is my parents will speak to me in Polish, and I’ll talk back in English and forget there’s two different languages being spoken. But sometimes we’ll flip the languages in the middle of a conversation and my parents will be speaking English and I Polish.
It’s very common here in Panama for conversations involving speakers of Spanish and English to be a jumble of both languages, often shifting in mid sentence. The language may change due to the relative fluency of those participating, or the subject. Some things are easier to say in one language or the other, or maybe someone forgets the right word. Some people may speak mainly one language or the others, while others switch.
A friend of mine used to work in a Greek restaurant. The one word of Greek he learned was malaka, which was usually directed at him.
Where I live there’s a boatload of French speakers although it’s an Anglo area, and it’s extremely common to hear this allllll the time. Couples speaking French to each other will slide into English for a sentence or two and then back again, or the less common variation I hear sometimes of one person speaking French and one speaking English while both speakers are perfectly fluent in both (although usually it’s each speaker speaking their mother tongue).
My husband and in-laws speak Vietnamese, though, and speak exclusively Vietnamese to one another except when there is no equivalent word, which makes me laugh when I hear a conversation that I understand nothing of besides “yes,” “no,” and say, “Toyota Tundra.”
No experience with English/Spanish, but yes, it’s pretty common with bilingual people. The example I’ve been the most familiar with was Occitan/French when I was a kid.
As another poster pointed out, one speaker using only language A and the other person answering only in language B isn’t that rare, either, when people are partially, but not fully, bilingual, since understanding a second language is usually easier than speaking it.
IIRC, this is the modern version of one of the words in the Bible that’s been traditionally translated as ‘homosexual’. Some people think that, in keeping with modern Greek, it should probably better be translated ‘wanker’ (in, uh, the most literal sense of the word), which might have some relevancy for the Christianity & homosexuality debate.
Do what?” For us, not speaking in front of someone in a language he doesn’t understand was so automatic we hadn’t even thought about it.
