Library Word of the Week - Code Switching

I'm a big fan of Firefly (the one season sci-fi Western by Joss Whedon). The characters all speak both English and Chinese, since "in this future, the only two surviving superpowers, the United States and China, fused to form the central federal government, called the Alliance, resulting in the fusion of the two cultures" (Wiki). 

Over the past two days, students have been taking the ACCESS test. This test is for ELL students, so I keep hearing both Spanish and English, often in the same sentence. This is called "code switching." 

"In linguistics, code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation. Multilinguals—speakers of more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other. Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety." (Wiki)  

Do you code switch? 

From Baldo Comics

For more information, check out: 
Code-switching to thrive

How Code-Switching Explains The World

Is your bilingual kid mixing languages?