Like I speak English and Portuguese, learning Dutch, and (not doing it for the sake of a primarily English-speaking community) but I will often switch between the two, like saying “Bom dia/Oi” to someone or “Tchau!”
I may also falar assim and I don’t do it to show off, it’s just comfortable pra mim. I will mix in a few português words. (Not exactly like this but YKWIM, maybe).
I’ve been noticing that when I read an English text to someone who also speaks my mother tongue, that I will switch to my mother tongue for reading out numbers. For some reason, it feels pretentious to pronounce it in English.
Can relate
Being English, I’m stubbornly monolingual (aside from some leftover schoolboy French), so when I was invited to a Sikh wedding I was genuinely amazed by all the guests just flowing between English and Punjabi as if they were the same language.
It’s not just them, a lot of people across the world speak a mix of english and their native tongue.
Even seen philipino subs coming to the reddit front page? They usually start with an English phrase and end in tagalog.
My wife and I are constantly switching between English and French when conversing amongst ourselves. I’ve often noted that when we want to emphasize a sentence, we use the others native language. It also comes in handy when in public and we want to convey something in secret, because both of our accents in our mother languages are quite strong, so at a whisper even people who know the language but are not fluent will not grasp what we are saying.
I’ve only ever heard this in American movies by hispanic characters. To me, it would feel extremely pretentious to do this in real life
In linguistics this is called “code switching”, and it is extremely common among native bilinguals.
Dialects, too.
Saint Louis Public Radio has a show titled Code Switch which is about discussing racism and derives it’s name from the behavior.
Not the same thing, but just the other day I accidentally started speaking French in the middle of a conversation in Spanish, and it took me a minute to understand why the guy suddenly couldn’t understand me
I’m bilingual English and Mandarin and I mostly do this in Chinese restaurants. The real hole in the wall places with the best Chinese food where the servers greet you in Mandarin by default if you look Chinese. Mandarin is more “computationally” expensive for my brain because I’m so used to speaking English so as soon as I have to express something complex I’ll just blurt it out in English instead of stuttering it out in Mandarin, which prompts an English response from the server, and we’ll go back and fourth switching between the two languages.
English, Spanish/Spanglish, and a bit of French. Parfois, I like to cambiar idiomas dans le middle of une phrase to mess with mes amigos. But yes I always mix up things. The most common is when I accidentally inject Spanish into French
Yes, that is very normal for multilingual people. It’s called code-switching and it has been intensively studied by linguists.
Yes, my mother tongue is English, and I spoke some Spanish before I began immersing in Italian. At one point, I couldn’t stop speaking ItalSpanGlish. Nobody could understand me.
Frequently mix my native and second language and sometimes can’t think of a good enough word in my native language. Rarely mix my third language except when speaking to people of that country or in that country.
Yeah, definitely. Spanglish (Spanish + English) is very common in California.
Hardly ever, but sometimes I find grammatical, syntactical, etc. elements of the other languages subtly bleeding through in my writing and speech. e.g. habitually writing “1.”, “2.”, and “3.” instead of “1st”, “2nd”, “3rd”, even for an English piece.
Maybe it stems from the way I acquired my languages. Code-switching tends to throw off my thought process, especially if I am the one doing it. I’ll have to finish a thought (or an entire chain of thoughts) in one language, and only then will I have an opportunity to switch the language.
Same, (in that I speak both Portuguese and English) and that I do sometimes feel the need to jump around
Olá!
I remember a subreddit called “Belgicaans”. It’s basically a place where we would converse in sentences that combined our three native languages (Dutch, French and German). Was very funny to do actually! But speaking like that? No, never
