Imagine you’re on the highway, driving a car faster than the car in front of you. To avoid the trouble of slowing down to stay in your lane, you maintain your speed but switch to the lane to your left. Maybe you jump back into the lane you were in previously once you’ve passed the car, or maybe you stay in your new lane.
This is something like a visual representation of what your mind is doing during the process of code switching. This linguistic tool, code switching, is the changing of one language variety, or “code,” to another while speaking, often in the middle of a sentence. To the uninitiated, hearing a person moving in and out of multiple languages as one moves in and out of the lanes on a highway sounds very much like the speaker has an incomplete handle of both languages. Why would they feel the need to switch unless they were moving around obstacles like one would move around a slower car on the highway?
Well, as sociolinguistic research has suggested, code switching does not represent a deficiency in either or both of the codes being switched, rather it exists as a tool to express extra-linguistic nuance that is not available to those speaking just one language (or at least, the nuance has to be expressed in a different way). It is similar, in this way, to one’s tone of voice or body language, all of which add something to the actual words being used. Thus, code switching is really more a tool of paralanguage.
We begin to understand code switching as more of a tool than a deficiency when we realize that there is a structure to it. People mostly do not code switch randomly or arbitrarily. They only do so of their own volition, and even then there are often social reasons that they are making the switch. But if anyone were to step outside the grammatical rules of both languages in order to, say, alternate languages with each word, this would be intentional wordplay, rather than technical “code switching,” and would often be hard to interpret by the intended recipient, even though they speak both languages as well.
This can be seen by the fact that code switching sticks to a syntactic formula, where the lanes of the highway can only be changed at certain points in speech, incorporating full syntactic phrases into the person’s speech, such that, for example, “el father,” “da him” or “at casa” would not be heard by a Spanish-English bilingual (italics on Spanish words).
So now that we’ve established that code switching is not a deficiency in knowledge of two languages, nor is it a randomly occurring, we have to look at the social instances that code switching appears and speculate what paralinguistic effects it brings to the interaction.
To do this, we first need to understand indexing, which is the sense, mood, or intention associated with a particular language in a particular context. When two languages are used in code switching interactions, they are described as indexing by their usage different qualities that are associated with one or the other language.
Let it also be noted that those who code switch are very selective about who they do it with. Obviously the ones doing the switching have to speak some mixture of the same languages, or else there would be meaning lost when one was used. But even then, not all speakers within that same bilingual community will code switch with all other members, nor do they do so consistently, because the different languages index separate things in different contexts.
Ways of Code Switching:
To illustrate this and describe the first explanation of code switching that we see, I will give the example of the “we code”-“they code” distinction. Code switching almost always takes place in situations where one language is that of the majority while the other is a minority language. Because minorities often maintain ties with each other within a majority culture, there are often feelings of closeness, comfort, and familiarity that are associated with this language (the “we code”) and other cultural practices that they maintain. In instances of code switching between languages in this way, we see these sentiments indexed by the switch to the minority language for topics such as family or the community. On the other hand, legal or business talk is often accompanied by a switch to the majority language (or the “they code”).
A similar explanation of code switching is that of markedness, specifically that there is a marked, or expected language, and any number of unmarked, or unexpected languages, in any interaction. In this instance, using an unmarked language indexes emotion, will, or even command if the communication is between a superior, customer, or parent. Its unexpectedness provides emphasis to one’s words.
Language crossing is an explanation of code switching that posits that speakers intentionally cross lines of identity in order to rework boundaries of ethnicity or social class in the moment of speech. Of course this is not conscious, but it does come from an intention to identify in a way that is particularly appealing for whatever reason, even if this change is just needed in the moment. Because language mostly comes from a subconscious place, the subliminal association of certain ways of speaking with certain attitudes, values, or statuses, provides a foundational “pool,” if you will, of linguistic knowledge that backs up a mood, impression, or identity that we want to express in the moment.
There are many other theories about why people code switch and I’d like to get to them eventually. But for right now, I think the most important thing to take away from this is that the jump from lane to lane, code to code, provides for a very specific and extremely fluid or even situational identity that speakers are constantly carving out with their different ways of speaking and indices behind them. There’s no deficiency here, just bilinguals doing their thing.
Language Biographies 