E.G. In movies if two individuals speak Spanish but also speak English, then they might transition to English in the middle of the conversation. Granted this might be a way to make their conversation easier to understand by the audience, but I like to believe that at least a few conversations are spoken in more than one language.
Does this happen in real life?
Comments
Yes
I sometimes switch between languages when talking to friends, family, and colleagues. Sometimes, my wife will talk to me in one language and I will reply in another.
Yep, all the time, and they often go back and forth if they are talking to someone who is also bilingual
Yep, all the time, and they often go back and forth if they are talking to someone who is also bilingual
Yes
Yes. In fact, if you’re among other bilinguals (knowing the same languages) you’ll mostly be speaking in a fusion of the two languages when you converse casually.
I went to a Francophone school; we were required to speak French even though the city we lived in was mostly Anglophone, including my family.
At school, we’d speak English until a teacher came into earshot, puis à ce point on changea de langues jusqu’au point que the teacher had passed, then we’d go right back to English.
I remember doing this in grade 3, so even kids do it.
I think so, sí.
In some fully bicultural bilingual communities, under rare circumstances, they can mix languages so much together that they become an actual new language called a mixed language that has stable, consistent integration of the two grammar and vocabulary systems. Generations later the speakers may only be able to speak the mixed language, not the two original languages. This is rare, but examples exist, like Michif and Media Lengua.
Everyone in my extended family except for me and my brother are bilingual, and they do it all the time.
Its called code switching.
As a Chicano dude, simon guey. Many Latinos speak Spanglish with random ass switches depending on how lazy or knowledgeable one is.
Yeah definitely. I was sitting next to some people doing it with Spanish and English for hours last night. Places like Singapore it’s incredibly common. I do it myself in Japanese and English often too
In text, my sister and I do this. We both speak Cantonese, Mandarin and English (but I spent a lot more time in Canada and she spent a lot more time in China, so while I am better at English, she is better at Chinese). I am a lazy idiot who set up my entire family’s iPhones on the same Apple ID, so I would have a conversation with her in English and then boom, she replies in Chinese. Some of the Chinese responses may be intended for our mom, who doesn’t speak English at all (and because all the phones are on the same ID, it is sometimes difficult to tell who the intended recipient is unless you understand the context).
What is interesting now is that my sister has a 10 year old son who speaks decent Cantonese but is illiterate in Chinese (the written language is very difficult to learn if you don’t go out of your way to learn it, especially if you live in an English speaking country, even if you are surrounded by people who speak it). He speaks Cantonese well because, as I mentioned, my mom has no knowledge of English. In fact, Chinese is so hard that even I started to suffer from character amnesia–I can read and type, but don’t remember how to write a lot of complicated characters anymore. Also, some of my writing may not be grammatically correct.
(I am an interpreter, switching languages is trivially easy for me because I do it 8 hours a day 5 days a week.)
even on reddit you can see it in posts where people switch back and forth between english and hindi or english and tagalog.
I don’t think there’s any question that this happens all the time but sometimes I try to work out why we switched languages at that particular point. As if some things are better expressed in one language rather than the other. What things? I can’t pin it down. It slides back and forward constantly. Around town there’s definitely a sense of speaking the majority languange but if it’s just me and one other then I don’t know why we cross back and forwards. Maybe just because we can.
I’d like to be able to define it- one language for intimacy, the other for humor but it doesn’t break down like that. I think we just use all the words at our disposal.
In Montreal, you’ll hear bilingual people switch between French and English all the time. Sometimes the word they think of is in the other language, so they switch (maybe not even realizing they’re doing it) and usually so does the other person. Then one of them switches back for the same reason. It’s pretty cool to experience if you speak both languages and can follow along.
My dad likes to tell a story about a couple of Swedish ladies at a barbershop (quartet) convention who would switch to Swedish without realizing it, and then stop when the realized everyone was looking at them very confused.
I’m two and a half degrees of separation from the biggest names in barbershop, AMA
(i won’t have answers, but you can sure ask!)
I was once hanging out with my friend who speaks English/French and was speaking French on her phone to her mom. I had just kind of tuned out because I don’t speak a word of French. She randomly switched to English and was like “what? what? [English sentence]” when she got off the phone, I commented about the part of the conversation I had heard and she had apparently completely missed that she had said anything in English and was like “wait you speak French now?”
Yes 🤣 I’m not bilingual by any stretch but I have some German and me and my German bestie are a hot mess together 🤣🤣🤣🤣 her English breaks. My German breaks. It’s very fun. To us at least. Anyone near us likely has a headache.
Yep. When speaking with my family and non close friends, I alternate between Filipino and heavily accented English. When I’m with my close friends we all speak (heavily Americanized) English.
Yes. Sometimes you don’t even do it on purpose.
In my country, all schools are required to teach english, starting at kindergarten, as well as our own language. So many english words have replaced the words of our language in our daily convos. Even when we have to name random things around the house, we say the english names, like glass, plate, table, shirt etc. my friends and i use “literally” a lot, in between an entire local language sentence.
Yeah, English-Japanese bilingual here but when talking with family it’s usually a mix of the both. It’s usually almost unconscious and depends on the context
lol yeah, my Portuguese cousins seem to do it more when they’’re arguing.
A friend of mine does this when speaking to his sister. He once said “Blah blah blah blah, spike them up the arse with a pitchfork, even if it is not lady like, blah blah blah.”
I don’t speak Spanish so I have no idea what context this was in.
yes. I used to work with a guy who spoke English, Arabic, Spanish, French, and some Italian.
I only speak English. Once we went to a bar after work and ran into a friend of his who spoke Spanish, with very little English, and he joined us. After a few drinks, my multi lingual friend stopped speaking English but was going on and on and I couldn’t understand a word, I looked at his Spanish speaking friend, because it didn’t sound like Spanish to me, and his friend goes “I don’t know what he saying too” We all laughed, realizing he went from switch back and forth between English and Spanish, to Arabic, his native language.
Yes.
My dad used to when talking to his parents. Sometimes it was easier for him to find a word in English rather than Polish, so he’d say that instead. As far as I know, others are the same.
Yes. And back and forth
All the time
Not even mid conversation, I had a roommate who would change languages mid sentence sometimes when talking to her mom
My family are all Welsh, but I didn’t move there until I was 9 (RAF). It was fascinating to find out that not only do they use English words quite a lot because they didn’t exist in Welsh, but sometimes because they were lazy because the Welsh words were so long and annoying to use in an everyday conversation
I lived for a year in the Philippine Visayas, and HELL yes, not only do people there switch from Visayan, to Spanish, to English in a single sentence, the language that they speak in a lot of areas is just the Malay-descended VSO structure with words from English, Spanish, Tagalog, and several other languages mashed together.
In fact, if you buy a cellphone over there, the two pre-loaded predictive text settings for SMS are literally “English” or “Taglish” (English-Tagalog code-mix). There is no pure “Tagalog” or “Cebuano” or “Ilocano” setting.
Eh, yes but not in the way it’s done in most movies, if that makes sense. Sometimes well say a phrase or word in English, then go back to Spanish.
I am in a multi lingual family. My wife and I speaks our mother tongue and English, and we live in a country with another different language. So there are 4 languages in the mix.
We had a child, and we only talk to him in our mother tongue. At 4 years old, he was already fluent in 3 of those languages and when speaking with both parents he could switch languages depending which parent he is looking mid sentence.
i speak 3 languages fairly regularly(3 from 3 different language families), yes my switching is good for the most part but for a few things i stumble like word order, cases and genders.
Yes.
I speak three languages on a daily basis, learning a fourth, understand three more to an extent.
I’ve been part of some really weird conversations.
i can answer this because i speak both of those languages. it’s… kinda? the movies do switch from Spanish to English. English is spoken the majority of the time
nah… I’m more like accidentally talks to bilingual friend in English. then I’m like in my head “wait, why am I talking in English?”. then i switch to Spanish and try to speak that the most
I was friends with a Chinese coworker who grew up in the Philippines. When he and his wife were talking to each other it would include English, Mandarin, Filipino, and some Spanish.
Another friend originally from Iran, then he and his wife spent 10 years in Austria before moving to the US. They mostly used Farsi, some German, with English words and phrases mixed in.
Another woman I worked with was French, her husband Turkish. They both spoke their native languages with their kids. So within the family a conversation could have French with mom, Turkish with dad, and English between the kids.
I do this a lot with different Chinese dialects (and a little English in there” with my mother – if you forget the word in English you can just transition to Chinese lmao
When I was a teenager, one of my best friends was bilingual. When she called home, she used to constantly switch between the two languages, sometimes inserting just a few words , sometimes speaking complete sentences in the other language than what she started with. Very funny to hear.
I live in a country with 3 official languages and a lot of people speak two of them without being bilingual, next to English (the 3rd language is spoken in only a small part of the country). At work it leads to funny situations where people switch between the 2 languages and English when discussing. So even without being bilingual, yes this is a thing.
More like a few words and sentences. Depends on what language you speak, but there’s definitely a phenomenon of young people speaking half in English in my country that is frowned upon and seen as cringe.
yes for me
Yes this happens all the time. Also the trope you see in movies and shows when angry people switch to their first language is 200% true.
Another thing is if you’re used to regularly speak in two or more languages, your brain tends to freeze up on occasion and you mix words and sentences by mistake.
For example sometimes when I speak french I’ll throw in an english word mid-sentence, for absolutely no reason, even if I know the french word (it’s my first language). It’s a bit funny.
Yep, my partner is from Belgium and when talking with friends from home will switch back and forth a good bit.
Yes, and we use words in different languages because they might have a difference nuance. Me and my wife speak the same four languages and we use them all.
It seems to be very different across the world. We never do that here in Sweden, but Indians, Filipinos and Indonesians seem to do it a lot.