How Code Switching Works

Code switching has likely gone on for centuries — probably ever since the first group of people who spoke one language moved into an area inhabited by people who spoke another tongue [source: Fought]. But while it's gone on forever, it wasn't studied or discussed much in the U.S. until relatively recently. The impetus appears to have been the emergence into the spotlight of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also called Ebonics.

In 1977, some parents of students attending Martin Luther King Elementary School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sued the school district board in U.S. district court because, they said, their kids weren't being taught standard English [source: Coffey]. Their kids were being raised at home speaking AAVE, the parents noted, and if they didn't learn to read and write standard English, their kids would end up functionally illiterate.

The parents weren't asking that their children be taught in AAVE, or that AAVE be taught in schools, as some people mistakenly characterized the suit. It was simply a request that their children be given assistance in learning to read standard English. The district court subsequently ruled in 1979 that the Ann Arbor School District Board must help all kids overcome language barriers that make it impossible for them to participate equally in school [source: The University of Michigan Library]. This case helped establish AAVE as a legitimate language and drew sociolinguists' attention to AAVE and other related linguistic issues, such as code switching.

Attention to code switching was further boosted by the resurgence of Spanglish, the commingling of the Spanish and English languages. While Spanglish has been spoken in pockets of America for centuries, since Spanish-speakers arrived to the continent well before the pilgrims, the more recent influx of Mexican immigrants that began in the 1990s caused Spanglish to become more widespread [source: Rothman and Rell]. And, with 54 million Hispanics in the U.S. as of 2013 — 17 percent of the population — it's here to stay [source: United States Census Bureau]. So the study of code switching will likely continue to expand and evolve, just like code switching itself.

We know code switching is not a new phenomenon. And we know educated, fluent speakers code switch; it's not something that pops out of the mouths of people who aren't fluent in a given language. So why do people do it? For many, it's inadvertent. Take the example of Stuart Horwitz, a native English-speaker fluent in French, and his husband, Xavier Saint-Luc, a Frenchman fluent in English. Horwitz and Saint-Luc always converse with each other in French. But Horwitz says when he's angry with Saint-Luc, he automatically starts yelling in English.

"English is a more emotional language for me, since it's my native language," he says. "And I don't have to think when I express myself. It also seems more powerful to express my anger in English."

Laughs Saint-Luc,"When he starts talking English, I know it's bad!"

Saint-Luc also notes that when conversing with Horwitz in French, he uses the English word for items that have strong connotations of America for him. "When we're [staying at our home] in the U.S., I often buy sunflowers," he says, "and I have to ask the clerk for 'sunflowers.' So whenever we're speaking in French and talking about the sunflowers, I use the English word for them, not the French."

More proactively, some people code switch to fit in with a group, morphing their speech to sound more like those around them. An example of this would be the Georgian native previously mentioned, who started saying "y'all" on her visit back home. Others code switch in the hopes it will make people like them or look kindly upon them. Many service-industry employees say they'll adopt a Southern accent because they typically receive better tips when they do. Customers are also generally friendlier to them when they sprinkle "y'alls" throughout their speech [source: Thompson].

While some people code switch to fit in, others toss in foreign words or phrases to show others they know a second language. Or to sound cool. Certain words or phrases simply sound better in another language or better express your emotion; for instance, "C'est la vie!" ("That's life!") [source: Nortier]. And some people code switch because they want to say something they hope no one but the person they're talking to will understand. But beware: My English-speaking friend and I once slipped into our high-school-level Spanish to describe a hot guy who entered the room — and he answered us back in that language. Oops.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of code switching is that there are certain grammatical rules that must be followed to properly code switch — and everyone who code switches knows what they are without being taught. For example, let's say you're speaking English with a Spanish-speaking friend and you'd like to tell him that you want a verde (green) motorcycle. According to English grammatical rules, you'd say, "I want a verde motorcycle." But this wouldn't be proper code switching, since in Spanish the adjective comes after the noun — and when you code switch an adjective, you must place it wherever it would go in its native tongue. Thus, a proper code switch would be, "I want a motorcycle verde." Conversely, if you were speaking Spanish together and code switching to English, you'd say, "Yo quiero un green motocicleta," not, "Yo quiero un motocicleta green." People fluent in both Spanish and English would spit out the proper code-switched sentence unconsciously [source: Heredia and Brown].

Also, the speaker would not switch language between a word and its endings unless the word could be pronounced in the language of its ending. So you could not say runeando ("running") moving between English and Spanish but you could say flipeando ("flipping") because "flip" could be a Spanish word [source Cook].

Other code-switching rules dictate when you can code switch. This "rule" is more loose, but you wouldn't, say, code switch every other word in a sentence. Here are several examples of code switching in various languages [sources: Nortier, Cook, Gonzalez]

Now that you know all about code switching, see how long it takes before you notice yourself or another person doing it. Hint: It probably won't be but a minute or two.