I have written here on numerous occasions about the mixing of languages. It is the most basic fact of communication between Sayaka and me, as it is between many of my friends. The newest pattern to make itself felt in my life is the fact that, increasingly, conversations with my Korean friends that I got to know during my time studying in Japan or China have become a mix of Japanese and Korean (with the most frequent pattern being them speaking in Korean, me starting an answer in Korean, giving up, and then either switching to Japanese or Chinese, depending on what secondary language we have in common, or at least throwing in words with J/C pronunciation whenever I need to).
I have also seen how fundamental language mixing of various kinds is to communication in many Chinese-American and Japanese-American households I have had occasion to interact with since I moved to the US (and in many cases there is also the interesting pattern in which a parent will speak to a child in one language, but their child will respond only or mostly in another). In fact, while I have no stats to back this up and would love to read more substantial research on this, I suspect that this mixing of various idioms in daily conversation, and not just the occasional word that might be absent or awkward to say, is and has been a basic fact of life for peoples in many communities around the world both in our times and perhaps more so in ages past.
In fact, I have often felt that in exchange for the clarity, efficiency, and stronger guarantees of accurate transmission, as well as the powerful creative forces of new national literatures that standardizing and legitimating certain idioms at the state level has we have lost an appreciation for the rich and highly varied possibilities that language allows for. I’m not lamenting some kind of pre-modern paradise of inter-lingual bliss, but I do think the way we view languages and some of the philosophies behind language learning need a good re-thinking. More on this some other time…
I have often wondered when and how this language mixing starts. My own case is too messed up to be representative. While reading in the coffee shop today I tuned into an interesting discussion between two fluent (and most likely native) Chinese speakers, one of whom had a heavy Beijing or northern accent. Since we are on campus and they were older students, I assume they were graduate students, and they may be two of the many students here who complete their undergraduate degrees in China and come here for graduate school.
They seemed to be in disagreement about a lot of things, and by the time I tuned in, the topic of the conversation had shifted, to my surprise, to the Chinese historian Simaqian. What I found interesting was the language mixing that this student, who may have only been in the United States a few years, was engaged in. I have seen this on countless of other occasions but today paid closer attention to how it worked in this case. If one can make any generalizations from the small sample of the conversation that I overheard, the mixing had these characteristics: 1) The English words in the conversation were not always chosen because the equivalents in Chinese are unusual or awkward. For example, she would say something like, “司马迁，这个life…” or “他的那个complexity…” 2) Words that bridge or transition; that connect sentences, were sometimes said in English. Thus, she might shift gears in the middle of a sentence by saying, “Well, 我知道…” 3) Sometimes I think the English words were used, as is possible in the cases mentioned in (1) above, in order to emphasize a particular point. Other times, I was left with the impression that they were used for the same reason that my mother (who is Norwegian) will throw in an English word in: because it was frequently used recently in English, the English word just happens to come to mind before the word comes to mind in one’s “mother” tongue. I would be interested in some of the more permanent and large scale examples of this: cases where, instead of specific words getting adopted and absorbed into languages (which is what most often comes to mind when we think of change in language), there is a more permanent free and flexible, if sometimes arbitrary borrowing from other “languages understood in common” among people in a community. Although I’m sure there a long list of places one could go to in order to explore this, Hong Kong pops to mind as one place where I suspect that this might happen on a large scale. Taiwan is another… In fact, perhaps we might find that any place where you have an official language at odds with the idiom of the majority would be a good place to look for these patterns…I wish I had paid more attention in that undergraduate socio-linguistics class!
You should look at the Code Switching Bibliographic Database. I don’t know if it has been updated recently, but it was fairly up to date in 2001.
Excellent, thanks Kerim!
Back in my first year of grad school in linguistics, I used my Japanese language teacher as an unwitting informant for a paper on code-switching in my sociolinguistics class. I don’t think I came to any particularly exciting conclusions, but I did notice that he would tend to switch to English when his subject matter switched away from Japan (for instance, talking about U.S. instead of Japanese holidays), and that he would tend to switch at structural boundaries (for instance, not in the middle of a verbal construction, but sometimes in the middle of a noun phrase when the order of modifier and head was similar). He was a lousy language teacher, a linguist who liked to explain rather than elicit the language he was supposed to be teaching.
We have a different kind of switching rule, you noticed? We don’t throw in foreign words (e.g. English words when mainly speaking in Japanese) that often, but we say one sentence in one language and another in a different language, and add something like “desho?” or “nandatte” or “I think” or “isn’t it cute?” in the end.
This is a topic that has been of special interest to me for a long time, probably because I have some personal experience from our own family, you Mitch, being born to an American father and a Norwegian mother.
Following your (and your sister’s) language development when you were little was fascinating. Although you learnt single words quite early, you were otherwise rather a slow speaker, and did not start to form proper sentences until about age 3+. In the meantime it was as if you just wanted to watch and listen until you could get it clear in your head which language belonged to whom, and then there was no stopping you (and this has been the general trend ever since! :-) ). Once you started talking, you would speak English to your dad and his visiting friends, and Norwegian to me and my visiting friends and relatives. However, an interesting phenomenon developed, which lasted a good ways into Kindergarten. When speaking Norwegian, you would take English nouns, and also verbs, and add Norwegian endings to them – like “jeg tørket hånden på towel’en” or “jeg jump’et ned fra rock’en” etc. On occasion, the same thing would happen when you spoke English; you would use the English language in the sentence, but still add Norwegian endings – in the case of the verbs, this happened both in the infinitive, past and present tense ” I dried my hands on the towel’en”, “I jump’et down from the rock’en”, “I hurt my head on the stairs’en” or – “jeg jump’er ned fra rock’en” and “if I jump’er ned stairs’en, vil jeg hurt’e my head” etc.
Up until preschool age, I always thought this was unique to you and our family, but when you started pre-school, which also had other children with American fathers and/or mothers, with the other parent being Norwegian, I discovered to my astonishment that they too spoke exactly the same way, and more often than not it would occur only with specific words, this being the exact same words that you had problems with.
Not only that, since we moved to the U.S., I’ve noticed the same thing with older, Norwegian children who live here in Bartlesville for 2-3 years. By the time they’re ready to move back to Norway, they use English verbs and nouns with Norwegian endings when they try to carry on a conversation in Norwegian. In a few amusing cases, this has resulted in some rather obscene (how do you spell that again?) words, which have necessitated a quick and stern correction from the mother (I won’t give examples of those here).
mom
I regularly find myself speaking Konglish nowadays. It doesn’t make me look particularly bright.
It will be interesting to see how my daughter Karisa learns English and Japanese. At almost 2 years old now, she jabbers all the time and knows lots of Japanese words (since we mostly speak Japanese at home) but will also spit out random English words she (we assume) learned from playing with other children in the neighborhood.
That’s pretty 有趣… ね〜 ;-)
Here’s an example, 你這個學期”拿”什麼課？ Common mistake made by even Chinese students who’ve been in the US after a certain amount of time.
Another example is, A: “Hey Steve, are you going to announce something cool at WWDC?”, B: “No, I’m not so i can dissapoint all our developers and send our stock nose-diving… (meaning, of course i will announce something insanely great!)… If you translate that dialogue into Chinese, the response made by B will likely not be understood…