The strange and wonderful world of code-switching

From rap to choral music, Penelope Gardner-Chloros explores linguistic mashups

Multi-lingual rappers Raggasonic

29Babel The Language Magazine | November 2013

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The lyrics are from ‘Raggasonic Crew Feat’ by Raggasonic, a Rasta band who sing in English, French, and a mixture of both. Apart from mixing languages – what we call ‘code-switching’ – their lyrics contain words borrowed from one language to the other (toaster); elements of creole (bwoy); and verlan (shown in capitals), a widely used type of French slang, which involves inverting the first and second syllables of multisyllable words and pronouncing single syllable words backwards (from envers=’back to front’). Verlan words are in capitals and are glossed in brackets above – note

that ‘Checla’ involves both borrowing and verlan at the same time.

Given the rap context, this mixed style could be seen simply as an artistic device. You could be forgiven for thinking that no-one would actually speak like this. But in fact there are countless people all over the world who speak – and often write as well – in such a mixed fashion. There is nothing new about it either. Remember the Christmas hymn, In dulci jubilo, written in the 14th century? It is in a so-called ‘macaronic’ mixture of Latin and German:

In dulci jubilo,Nun singet und seid froh!Unsers Herzens WonneLeit in praesepio;Und leuchtet wie die SonneMatris in gremio.Alpha es et O!

For many years – throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century – bilinguals were thought of as imperfect, even retarded, if they did not keep their languages strictly separate. Immigrant parents were advised never to mix languages in the home – and often in fact to speak the host country language to their children, however badly they mastered it. The Governor of Texas in the 1930s is reported to have said: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” Even the pioneering sociolinguist Uriel Weinreich, wrote in the 50s: “The ideal bilingual switches from one language to another according to appropriate changes in the speech situation…but not in an unchanged speech situation, and certainly not within a single sentence”.

Code-switching first started to be studied seriously in the 1970s by linguists with studies by John Gumperz, the linguistic anthropologist featured in Issue 4 of Babel. He was intrigued by language mixing in Kupwar, India, where the same languages, Kannada and Marathi, had been in contact for hundreds of years without ever fully merging. In quite another context, that of a village in Norway, Hemnesberget, Gumperz described the alternation between different varieties of Norwegian, namely the local dialect and a more official, pan-Norwegian variety. In the latter case, there are

Let us start our discussion of code-switching with the words of a rap (English translation in the right hand column):

Les femmes sont nice The women are nice

et la dancehall roule and the dancefloor is rolling

La basse percute tous les Rastas The bass hits all the Rastas

dans la foule in the crowd

Le sélécteur joue du rub-a-dub The selector plays some rub-a-dub

ou de la soul or some soul

Les bad-boys sont là The bad-boys are here

Les bad-boys sont là The bad-boys are here

Eclaire le chemin Light the way

Quand Raggasonic SSEPA (=passe) When Raggasonic goes by

La dancehall est full, The dancefloor is full

Mory, Big Red sont vraiment là Mory, Big Red are really here

Je viens d’Ivry, le Sud I come from Ivry, the South

est le best dans le ragga is the best at reggae

Si t’es pas d’accord bwoy If you don’t agree bwoy

viens donc nous CHECLA (=clasher) come on and clash us

J’ai pas peur de la compétition I’m not afraid of the competition

j’ai pas peur de toi I’m not afraid of you

Tu peux toaster comme Buju You can toast like Buju

ou tester comme Shabba or test like Shabba

Toaster comme Beanie Man Toast like Beanie Man

ou bien comme Bounty Killa or else like Bounty Killa

Je n’ai peur d’aucuns deejays I’m not afraid of no deejays

des Antilles à RIPA (=Paris) from the Antilles to Paris

People massive écoute ça massive people listen to that

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some similarities with the Low and the High varieties found in diglossic situations, such as those described by Charles Ferguson in a famous article, ‘Diglossia’, in 1959. In Diglossia the different languages are deployed according to specific aspects of the situation, such as its formality; in code-switching, on the other hand, by definition, both varieties are used within the same conversation, and often by the same speaker in the same utterance. Take this example:

L.1 and she was sleeping all over the place, so I had to stay awakeL.2 digdthi-firdthi si everywhere, so I had to stay awake(she was falling around everywhere, so I had to stay awake)

In L.1 above, a Punjabi-English bilingual in London describes a situation in English, then reiterates her description slightly differently in Punjabi, switching back to English again half way through. Neither the Punjabi nor the English are exact repetitions of the first line (‘all over the place’ has become ‘everywhere’), but the speaker enlivens her description by changing it subtly the second

time round, including a change of language.

Often, as in L.2, the switch comes in mid-sentence with no pause, causing linguists to wonder how bilinguals accomplish the mental gymnastics involved in switching grammars and phonologies without pausing or slowing down their speech rate. In Annette Schmidt’s study of a dying Aboriginal language, Dyirbal, we find utterances such as this one, where we can only speculate as to why the speaker switched languages where they did:

We tryin’ to warn ban wuigi nomo wurrbay-gu.We were trying to warn her not to speak [Dyirbal].

So what is the key to these mysterious changes? A short recap of some well-established facts about code-switching provides a start:

Code-switching is as common between closely related languages as between totally unrelated ones. So while it is patently fairly easy, at a technical level, to switch back and forth between, say, Italian and Spanish, or German and Dutch,

code-switching is also found in abundance between French and Arabic in Morocco, English and Chinese on Tyneside, or Spanish and Quechua in Bolivia. Its widespread nature gives us a clue: that code-switching somehow gives the speaker some extra ways of getting their meaning across. We should bear in mind the quotation from Thomason and Kaufmann’s classic study of language contact: “It is the sociolinguistic history of the speakers, and not the structure of their language, that is the primary determinant of the linguistic outcome of language contact”.

At first sight, many people tend to explain code-switching as a sign that the speaker either does not know the relevant words or expressions in the other language, or is too lazy to bother to search for them. But in fact, code-switching often occurs

“Code-switching is as common between closely related languages as between totally unrelated ones. So while it is patently fairly easy, at a technical level, to switch back and forth between, say, Italian and Spanish, or German and Dutch, code-switching is also found in abundance between French and Arabic in Morocco, English and Chinese on Tyneside, or Spanish and Quechua in Bolivia.”

The bilingual mind

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in speakers who are perfectly capable of speaking either language monolingually when necessary. We can demonstrate this through many examples where speakers repeat the same thing, more or less, and use the same words, within a short space of time in the other language. We must therefore conclude that the code-switching, if not necessarily ‘deliberate’ in any conscious sense, is nevertheless functional in their speech, i.e. it serves a purpose which could not be accomplished by sticking to the same language throughout.

Another frequent assumption is that code-switching provides words or expressions which do not exist in the other language. This certainly happens, but making a cultural reference to a concept (sometimes called ‘mot juste’ switching) is only the tip of the

iceberg. Here is an example from Erica McClure’s study of Mexico:

No me precipitaré en el famoso name-droppingI will not throw myself headlong into the famous practice of name-dropping

Like code-switching by second language learners, who are forced to switch when they don’t know a word, this provides a rather obvious motive for code-switching, and one which often leads to borrowing in the long term. But there are many other recurrent functions of code-switching, regardless of the language combination. Several researchers have produced lists of these functions: specifying which person one is addressing; highlighting a quotation; emphasis; moving from an authoritative, official voice to a

more familiar, vernacular one; and so on and so forth.

Perhaps the most intriguing type of code-switching is that which appears to have no such purpose, and where speakers switch back and forth from one language to another without any apparent motive at all. One type of explanation for this behaviour is provided by Li Wei in his study of Chinese speakers in Britain. Li Wei convincingly demonstrates that bilinguals can use code-switching as a kind of conversational scaffolding, to structure their discourse. He describes code-switching through the eyes of Conversation Analysis, which pays attention to such features as pausing, repetition, interruption and overlap, which are used to structure monolingual conversation. In bilingual speakers, code-switching provides an additional resource

Code-switching billboard advert

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which supplements those available to the monolingual. In this example, this Chinese boy (B)’s long pause and his use of English in response to his mother (A)’s question - which she has repeated in Chinese - are simultaneously indicative of his lack of enthusiasm for telling his mother about his homework. Long pauses such as those found here (a 2 second pause feels like a long pause in fluent conversation, and usually means something is up) are known as markers of ‘dispreferred’ responses in Conversation Analysis.

A: Finished homework?B: (2 second pause)A: Steven, yiu mo wan? (want to review your lessons?)B: (1.5 sec. pause) I’ve finished.

The many examples we find of rapid, fluent and apparently unmotivated code-switching can be explained partly by the fact that in many bilingual communities, it becomes so much the norm to switch languages that speakers do it in an entirely automatic fashion in order to balance out the number of words in Language A and the number in Language B. Carol Myers-Scotton has referred to this as ‘switching as an unmarked choice’, and in these cases it would be more socially marked to speak one of the languages on its own.

Code-switching in Strasbourg, Alsace, provided me with an example of such ‘mixed discourse’ when I lived there and studied it in the 1980s. The local vernacular in Alsace is a dialect of German, ‘Alsatian’, and the official language and the language of education, the media, and wider communication is French. Speakers like Mr.Eder below

could be found with ease – showing both that they were able to speak French like the next person and that they were ‘good locals’ who were not too proud to use their dialect. In this passage, he was bemoaning the inadequacies of the local butchers:

du bekommsch do e fätze… je sais pas dans quelle graisseyou get some sort of scraps… in goodness knows what sort of fat…avec quoi: avec de de de was weiss denn de teiffel…with what: with the the the the devil knows whatnoh geh i anne un! putz diss dingthen I have to go and clean the thing upparce que lorsque tu as un morceau de viande im…im tellerbecause when you have a piece of meat on… on your plateun noochher hesch eso gschnuddels un muesch abschniede diss ganze ding gell.and then you find you have a sort of mess and you have to cut the whole thing off you seeoder e so hoch fett uf’m ding… diss haw i halt schliesslich a nitt gere gell?or fat this high on it… I really don’t like that at all you see

Yet all these various explanations for code-switching only answer some of the questions which it raises. We might understand the motivations for using a fifty-fifty mode of speech at a general level, but this does not mean that we can explain why the switches occur where they do - nor how this rapid changeover occurs in the brain. Code-switching is a complex and many-layered topic and a multidisciplinary approach is called for to cover all its different aspects. At a certain point, the sociolinguistic explanation as to why it occurs tips over into the

psycholinguistic issue of how it is possible. This is where the recent discoveries of psycho- and neurolinguistics become particularly relevant. These have turned much of the previous wisdom on its head.

First, it used to be thought that bilinguals could switch languages thanks to a kind of on-off switch in the brain, rather like a light switch. Second, the 20th century psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature tended to assume that different languages were stored in different parts of the brain: the mother tongue in the left hemisphere, and other languages in the right. But thanks to the increasingly sophisticated understanding we have now of brain activity – partly, but not

“It used to be thought that bilinguals could switch languages thanks to a kind of on-off switch in the brain, rather like a light switch.”

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only, as a result of new (MRI and PET) scanning techniques – it has become clear that languages – however many you speak – are all stored in the same side of the brain, at least as far as the linguistic nuts and bolts are concerned. It is possible that some of the more abstract, metaphorical and emotional aspects are represented in the right hemisphere, and there are some effects also of age and type of acquisition (more ‘schooled’ learning techniques may result in slightly different representations in the brain). Although there is indeed a centre in the brain which controls switching – not only between languages but between other activities – this in no way resembles an on-off switch as it used to be thought, as it operates more fluidly and flexibly.

The new lab-based findings are increasingly compatible with our understanding of bilingual speech in the real world. The assumed separation of the languages in the brain, and the presumed clunky ‘on-off switch’, used to make it difficult to understand how bilinguals could alternate languages so quickly and fluently. But now that it is widely accepted by psycho- and neurolinguists that both languages are activated at once, and that they jointly and simultaneously affect your cognition, we can see more easily how, (a) code-switching can be a fluid process, and (b) bilinguals can exploit the interaction between their languages in a creative manner, rather than being hampered by it. In fact the work of Ellen Bialystok has shown that although being bilingual may slow speakers down a little on monolingual word-retrieval tasks, overall their practice at switching between languages enhances various

cognitive abilities, in adults as in children. These advantages range from greater mental flexibility and divergent thinking to a delay in the onset of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s in the elderly.

These results, of course, have to do with the effects of being bilingual rather than the effects of code-switching as such. Furthermore they record the effects rather than explaining the causes and mechanisms. There is still a long way to go before the sort of fluent, everyday and natural code-switching, of which examples have been given above, can be investigated in replicable and reliable ‘scientific’ studies. But it is no longer science fiction to imagine that in the future, we will be able to monitor certain types of brain activity outside the lab, with portable measuring devices connected to speech recorders, and to detect more accurately what happens when speakers switch languages naturally. What is clear already is that code-switching, by providing a ‘visible/audible’ transition within speech, can allow us to gain exciting insights into how speakers create and structure not only conversation, but also meaning more generally. ¶

Penelope Gardner-Chloros is Professor of Sociolinguistics & Language Contact, Department of Applied Linguistics & Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. ou can find further details of her research, and listen to her inaugural lecture, on her website: www.bbk.ac.uk/linguistics/our-staff/penelope-gardner-chloros

"… the work of Ellen Bialystok has shown that although being bilingual may slow speakers down a little on monolingual word-retrieval tasks, overall their practice at switching between languages enhances various cognitive abilities, in adults as in children. These advantages range from greater mental flexibility and divergent thinking to a delay in the onset of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s in the elderly."

Find out moreBooksFerguson, Charles (1959) Diglossia. First appeared in Word vol. 15 pp325-40. Available at: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/cours/2611pdf/Ferguson-Diglossia.pdfPenelope Gardner-Chloros (1991)Language Selection and Switching in Strasbourg, Oxford University Press: Oxford Penelope Gardner-Chloros (2009) Code-switching, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge

WebYou can find further details of Penelope Gardner-Chloros’s research, and listen to her inaugural lecture, on her website: www.bbk.ac.uk/linguistics/our-staff/penelope-gardner-chloros

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