As the OP notes, it’s VERY common for Hispanic Texans to drift in and out of English and Spanish when conversing, but I’ve never seen one person speaking English while the other speaks Spanish.
Now, recently I saw an article on Jeb Bush’s family, and it seemed as if Jeb’s wife Columba still feels very self-conscious about her English, so she usually speaks Spanish at home, while her kids (who understand Spanish) genberally answer her in English (which Columba understands but still speaks poorly).
Yes I do it all the time. I talk to my dad in both Hindi and English, whatever is convenient. Also when my relatives talk to me in Punjabi I generally answer in Hindi. My Punjabi is not so good and everyone laughs at me.
I know I keep getting dinged by friends and co-workers because I’ve been known to pepper my speech with English. Sometimes the right word/expression/concept comes up in the “wrong” language first ; or it simply has a better way to convey my meaning.
For example, for all its flowery insults French lacks the ability to convey the half-angry puzzlement of a good, heartfelt “What the FUCK ?!” :).
Same in India! They are anxious to practice their English with a “real American” so they try so hard. And I want to practice my Hindi so I speak that language.
From my in-depth study of French slang (OK, I watch Engrenages when it runs on BBC4), I got the impression that “Oh putain!” is used, with varying intonations, for much the same range of meanings as English-speakers use the F-bomb.
For a year I roomed with a friend who was also my Irish teacher. She was also fluent in French, and though I had only two years of high-school French, my French at that time was better than my Irish.
To practice, I would always try to speak to her in Irish, but many times subconsciously would substitute in a French word or phrase when the Irish one didn’t come quickly enough. She didn’t always notice, and occasionally responded to that phrase in French, again, not on purpose. Sometimes she’d start out speaking to me in Irish, but if the conversation was taking too long, she slip a clarifying phrase of English in to hurry it along.
One night when we both had stomach upset after a picnic, she rushed to the bathroom to find the door shut. I heard: Merde! Bheith leat tapa, s’il vous plait! Please, please, please!
True, yet to me “oh putain” is more about being dismayed or frightened by a surprise - but not necessarily thrown off. It’s the perfect expression for when you’re caught off-guard or are involved in a near miss of some kind ; or when you’re annoyed that you just dropped something. WTF is for when you’re not just surprised, but genuinely don’t understand what’s going on - and don’t enjoy it :).
Of course, “putain” has a lot more specific uses than that. I find a dragged on " putaiiiiin" conveys put-upon exasperation a lot better than a laconic “fuck”, or even a “fuuuuuck” ; while “fuck that shit” is unbeatable for expressing the futility/purposelessness of doing something.
Very common with my Polish parents. They’ll speak Polish, I’ll speak in English. Occasionally, we’ll flip languages. Oftentimes, if there are other people not familiar with Polish with us, I will forget another language is being spoken and ask the non-Polish speaker for input, only to be reminded that the pertinent part of the conversation was not in English.
I do that as well. Sometimes if I can’t come up with the appropriate word while speaking Spanish, I will use an Italian word instead if it’s more readily available at the time. Once or twice I’ve reverted to German, which is odd seeing as how I remember just about zip from four years of high school German.
I’ve experienced this. I studied Japanese for 3 years in high school and I’d get to thinking in that language during class being fully immersed in it. I’d have to switch back to English mentally before my next class.
Once or twice I had someone address me in English right after I left class and I’d respond in Japanese. I’d apologize and respond again in English. It was so weird and a bit embarrassing because I probably sounded like I was crazy.
I can’t let this thread go without mentioning the town of Biel/Bienne (its official name, as I just discovered from Wiki: Biel/Bienne - Wikipedia) in which every inabitant is bilingual and speaks to other towns people in their native tongue, German or French) and is anwered in the other language if it is their native tongue. So these bilingual conversations are not only common but de rigeur. It is located in the Jura mountains in Bern on the Bielersee/Lac de Bienne.
Yet a few tens of miles away lies the bilingual town of Fribourg/Freiburg where I once lived for a year and never observed this phenomenon.
This is distinct from “code switching” mentioned upthread in which thoroughly bilingual people speaking to each other switch languages in the middle of a sentence. It turns out that code switching has been studied at some length by linguists and has a distinctive grammar all its own
I find the specific pattern - of one person speaking one language and the other responding in another - is more common in a circumstance of confidence, like the family. We have this sometimes in my family where there are in fact four different languages we speak but some are much stronger in one but there is not the pressure to speak in the other language.
Or in my working group where we now each other well and do not feel a need to prove speaking the particular language… of the three we use. Although in the end we have more of a code switching but it sometimes takes the pattern of speaking one language and respondant responding in another.
It is different from the code switching as Hari Seldon says.
A friend of mine who lived in Japan and spoke Japanese relatively well said it was rather common for him to say something to a Japanese person, in Japanese, and have the other person respond, “I’m sorry - I don’t speak English”. In Japanese.
I’ve heard of this as well. I was planning to be an exchange student in high school but that fell through. I was warned about the possibility of this as well as other cultural quirks. Some people in Japan will refuse to understand a foreigner no matter how well you speak. I’m sure that sort of thing happens everywhere (including the US) but it is supposedly very common in Japan.
I do not think you need to attribute this to a Japanese culture.
I have sometimes not understood someone at first who I was expecting to speak their native language and then spoke one of my langauges, it was not only they did not speak it with a clear accent, it was also my expectation - if our brain is expecting to hear one thing and does not get that, like in switching languages there can be a stumble. Once I understood they were seeking to speak say the Arabic, I could expect and follow better.
It is not only just refusing - I am sure it can happen, but the mental expectation of the language.
My grandmother told about she and her siblings would speak to their parents in English and their parents would speak to them in the old tongue.
Being a college professor for many years, I heard a lot of mixed language conversations. Especially when technical terms had to be used. Sometimes in mid sentence an English term would get used and then the rest of the sentence would continue in English.
And I want to practice my Hindi so I speak that language.