zompist bboard

This isn't 100% in the spirit of this thread but it's the best place to put this.

I'm finding myself surprised by the extent to which speakers of a language code switch lexemes that have more or less equivalents in each language. I'd say they're probably even nonce borrowings, but what purpose do they serve?

I was recently speaking French with two Belgians and one of the Belgians was explaining in French how she "aura besoin d'acheter des "furnitures" pour son appart." Now there is a perfectly equivalent word for "furniture" in French, "meubles", and in fact the French word "fourniture" has a different meaning all together. So what purpose did this borrowing serve? I witness this a lot but usually it's with words that, while equivalents exist, speakers do not consider them equivalents. A common example is "barème" for "rubric." French speakers are more likely to say "rubric" because perhaps semantically it's deeper or more representative than "barème." But this makes sense. It makes sense that a native speaker would borrow an anglicism like "powerpoint" instead of the invented word "diaporama" or whatever the hell the Académie invented, but why would you borrow "furniture?" What is the purpose of this sort of non-productive* nonce borrowing?

*As a sociolinguist I shouldn't call it "non-productive" but I don't know what else to call it.

Dude, you seriously need to catch up with the literature on code-switching. The idea that it's always motivated is out the window. McLaughlin's work in Dakar, for instance, showed that using pure Wolof or pure French were marked choices for educated urban-dwellers with promiscuous code-switching being the unmarked default. All the speaker is doing by dropping in a word like "furniture" is indicating membership in a cosmopolitan social class. It's a badge of identity, like an American collegiate t-shirt or listening to DJ Khaled. The English isn't there because of any gaps in French; it's just a form of ornamentation, like buying an imported beer when domestic would be just as good. German ads are full of it.

linguoboy wrote:Dude, you seriously need to catch up with the literature on code-switching. The idea that it's always motivated is out the window. McLaughlin's work in Dakar, for instance, showed that using pure Wolof or pure French were marked choices for educated urban-dwellers with promiscuous code-switching being the unmarked default. All the speaker is doing by dropping in a word like "furniture" is indicating membership in a cosmopolitan social class. It's a badge of identity, like an American collegiate t-shirt or listening to DJ Khaled. The English isn't there because of any gaps in French; it's just a form of ornamentation, like buying an imported beer when domestic would be just as good. German ads are full of it.

I'm aware of that aspect when using anglicisms, but up until this example they were typically anglicisms that had some sort of semantic advantage in the speaker's mind*. Words related to technology that the speaker may have learned first in English, or words which evoke a certain membership as you said within a certain semantic field, like using music terminology relating to pop, or whatever.

But you are right that I am not too well read on code switching besides a few papers and a few conference presentations I've attended. It didn't occur to me that a benign word such as "furniture" which the speaker should not consider particularly associated with some sort of English-dominated semantic field, could also serve to mark membership. So the aspect of using rather benign words to mark membership is new to me (I mean I suppose I knew about it in established contact situations like French/Wolof but this wasn't really an established contact situation).

*Well I suppose that's not entirely true on second thought. It didn't occur to me but I've seen many adds that used pretty benign anglicisms for which there was absoutely no gap. I suppose I've simply never heard them used so clearly in conversation.

It happens all the time in Japanese. Some of the reasons are:

- As mentioned above, using these words can be cool or hip, while the native word may sometimes feel stuffy, old-fashioned, traditional, etc.

- As a consequence of the above, certain words become established in and/or restricted to specific situations. An example is ナウ nau "now". The Japanese word for "now" (今 ima) is far more common and in no danger of being replaced, but the English word is sometimes used in statements like "I'm doing X now" or "I'm at X now." I believe it originated in twitter, which explains why it's primarily only used to describe the speaker's current situation, and why it has a cool or hip vibe to it. So sometimes code switching seems random, but it may in fact have some sociolinguistic connotations.

- People are doing it to show off and/or intimidate. I've seen complaints about there being too much English being added into Japanese business talk, and its probably there because people want to feel powerful by showing off their knowledge of English (something businesspeople in Japan are taught is essential, even if it's not) and making people confused but too ashamed to admit they don't understand.

- The speaker perceives some nuance in one word that they feel works better in their sentence.

- For whatever reason, the word in one language slipped their mind, but the word in the other language did not, so they just switch languages for that one word.

"Furniture", of course, is not a "benign" word at all. It's a word relating to fashion (decor being a part of fashion), and hence at the cutting edge of cultural prestige. Which is probably why it's a French loanword in English in the first place (and why the rest of Europe uses another French loanword for it). And why "decor" is a loanword, and "fashion", and the names of most articles of furniture. After all, there was never any semantic necessity to borrow French words like "chair" and "table" and "couch" and "wardrobe" - we could have perfectly happily kept on talking about stools, boards, settles and clothing-chests...


More generally, I'm not sure how accurate it is to think of people as thinking of themselves as knowing the vocabulary of many languages - at least, I'm not sure that that's really how they work in the moment, even if it is how they rationalise it after. I suspect they just have a 'vocabulary', that includes all the languages they really know (ie are familiar with using, not just can struggle through with), and that they reach for the most 'appropriate' word each time. The linguistic context of the conversation is part of what makes a word more or less appropriate, but only a part - I don't think it's as binary as "now I will use a French word!" and "now will use an English word!". Instead, I think some words are just internally labelled as "really good when you're talking French" and some are labelled "really god when you're talking English", but a lot are in the middle, and of course who you're talking to and when and where are also factors.
[Eg is 'chapeau' an English word? Most people would say it's not. But if you talk to English-speaking cycling fans, you'll hear 'chapeau' a lot*. Are we speaking a little niche English argot that include 'chapeau' as an English word, or are we continually code-switching to French for this one word? I don't think there's necessarily a truth of the matter. Rather, 'chapeau' is a word that's in our vocabularies partway between one language and another.]

[*Cyclingspeak is stuffed with loanwords (and sometimes calques) from French and Italian, and sometimes Spanish or Dutch. These range from the obviously technical jargon (peloton, bidon, grimpeur, etc) to less technical "flavour" words, like "grinta" (loosely, stubbornness, psychological resilience, sometimes balls). I picked 'chapeau', however, as it's a part of cyclingspeak not used just to describe cylcing, but just something used among fans regardless of the topic. [loosely, 'kudos'. Found as an exclamation (chapeau!), or in "chapeau to..."]

Salmoneus wrote:"Furniture", of course, is not a "benign" word at all. It's a word relating to fashion (decor being a part of fashion), and hence at the cutting edge of cultural prestige. Which is probably why it's a French loanword in English in the first place (and why the rest of Europe uses another French loanword for it). And why "decor" is a loanword, and "fashion", and the names of most articles of furniture. After all, there was never any semantic necessity to borrow French words like "chair" and "table" and "couch" and "wardrobe" - we could have perfectly happily kept on talking about stools, boards, settles and clothing-chests...


More generally, I'm not sure how accurate it is to think of people as thinking of themselves as knowing the vocabulary of many languages - at least, I'm not sure that that's really how they work in the moment, even if it is how they rationalise it after. I suspect they just have a 'vocabulary', that includes all the languages they really know (ie are familiar with using, not just can struggle through with), and that they reach for the most 'appropriate' word each time. The linguistic context of the conversation is part of what makes a word more or less appropriate, but only a part - I don't think it's as binary as "now I will use a French word!" and "now will use an English word!". Instead, I think some words are just internally labelled as "really good when you're talking French" and some are labelled "really god when you're talking English", but a lot are in the middle, and of course who you're talking to and when and where are also factors.
[Eg is 'chapeau' an English word? Most people would say it's not. But if you talk to English-speaking cycling fans, you'll hear 'chapeau' a lot*. Are we speaking a little niche English argot that include 'chapeau' as an English word, or are we continually code-switching to French for this one word? I don't think there's necessarily a truth of the matter. Rather, 'chapeau' is a word that's in our vocabularies partway between one language and another.]

[*Cyclingspeak is stuffed with loanwords (and sometimes calques) from French and Italian, and sometimes Spanish or Dutch. These range from the obviously technical jargon (peloton, bidon, grimpeur, etc) to less technical "flavour" words, like "grinta" (loosely, stubbornness, psychological resilience, sometimes balls). I picked 'chapeau', however, as it's a part of cyclingspeak not used just to describe cylcing, but just something used among fans regardless of the topic. [loosely, 'kudos'. Found as an exclamation (chapeau!), or in "chapeau to..."]

While I do agree that you make some good points here there's one thing that I'd argue with. I'm not sure that a speakers only have one vocabulary. I am not read up on code switching as I said as it's not my area of study, but I do remember attending a conference presentation where the speaker, a well known sociolinguist, was talking about the rules of code switching so while my memory is rusty this means to me that speakers draw from two vocabularies and code switch for a reason, not that they simply look for the best word in one large mix of vocabulary.

For the situation you mentioned with chapeau I'd say that this word is a borrowing in English, meaning it exists in both the speaker's French vocabulary within the semantic field of fashion and in the speaker's English vocabulary within the semantic field of cycling. It is in essence a vocable with lexemes in different languages and even different lexemes in one given language. If all of our vocabulary came from one large mixed vocabulary then wouldn't we have to disregard the entire concept of borrowing as borrowing implies integrating the lexeme of one language into another on a scale large enough that it is recognized by an entire speech community (in the case of chapeau with a sense of semantic reduction, coming originally from fashion to a technical word of cycling jargon).

Do any people here code switch in their day-to-day lives? I do to some extent, and I have a few thoughts on this.

First, some reasons for doing it at the word-level: I can only provide anecdotal evidence here, but I find that I will insert Japanese words into English only when the idea is easily expressed in Japanese but not in English, either conceptually or because the word is slightly shorter. Things like foods, certain set expressions, etc.

A lot of non-Japanese people in Japan will not bother to translate large numbers when referring to prices, because Japanese and English number systems function so differently that it takes extra cognitive effort to translate the number.

I notice that I rarely add English words in while speaking Japanese and am more prove to do so when speaking English, but this is likely a consequence of my environment; if I lived in Canada and had a lot of culturally specific things I discussed on a regular basis, I can imagine I might add more English in Japanese, the reverse of what I do now.

However, I do think that people separate their vocabularies based on language. In general, I tend to switch at the sentence level, rather than the word level, which doesn't seem to make sense of I'm just drawing on a single pool of words that are not connected to languages. I also never replace verbs or adjectives, and the majority of nouns that have close enough equivalents. I do not know how a theory as broad as "vocabulary is not divided by language" could account for these.

I was writing a reply at home on the iPad but had to go, but yeah, I code switch every day. I tend not to use English words in German so much because, I guess, I'm Speaking German Now™ and also because I have a few German friends who don't speak much English... but the reverse is not true. There's no one here who I see regularly who doesn't know any German, so even with people with whom I normally speak English, I freely throw in German words or a whole clause in German if it pops into my head first. It's mostly nouns that this happens with but I routinely say im Nachhinein because my brain refuses to find "retrospectively" or "in hindsight/retrospect" or whatever is appropriate in time. This has been a problematic phrase for me for years, even before I knew its equivalent in German. It's a bit weird when a monolingual English speaker from my old life is in town and I stell fest that I can't talk like this and there are words for things that I'm forgetting or getting out of the habit of using, or don't even know what they are in English. Like, I don't even know what to call an Imbiss... and my brain comes up with stupid things like "shit restaurant" which is a terrible translation, or "cheap food place" which is slightly better.

when I was back home, someone asked what scampi is and I wanted to say it's basically ebi-fry, but I realized that would be less helpful and had to stifle myself. I find it mildly frustrating when I can't mix vocabulary, even though on a day-to-day basis I'm generally speaking only English at work, as it's either to students wanting to learn English or to genuinely monolingual coworkers (I don't understand how they can live here for years and not speak a lick of the language except for the most basic greetings, but there you go)

also yeah big money it's all about juu man yen, even with those who don't speak Japanese well. I've also heard "five man" a lot for ¥50,000.

My friend does this a lot more than me.... they'll say things like "let's 合わせ our schedules" and so on.

I can confirm that I did the same thing in French when in Belgium but it was almost always words that had no decent equivalent in French. The difference with French (and you can tell me if this is the case in Japanese [I don't think it is in German, it wasn't in Dutch]) is that you have to phonetically assimilate the word into French. So if I talked about "les electors" I had to pronounce it à la française. Same thing with basically every instance of code switching "je vais regarder du netflix" only /i/ no /I/ and with word-final sentence stress, etc.

But I never know where one draws the line between code switching and out right borrowing. It could be argued that "netflix" is a borrowing in French.

finlay wrote:(I don't understand how they can live here for years and not speak a lick of the language except for the most basic greetings, but there you go)

Before I went to Belgium I'd agree but while I was there I witnessed exactly how this phenomenon occurs. My husband lived in Belgium for a year and today he can barely say Bonjour and I doubt he even knows the words for how are you in French. He wasn't the only person I knew there who basically learned no French. This was a pretty ripe phenomenon for ERASMUS students. The problem is they only socialize with fellow ERASMUS students and English is the lingua franca of ERASMUS students*. So a lack of socializing with native speakers and a lack of motivation can mean people can live in a country for years and never learn a lick of the language. A colleague of mine actually studies this. Her findings found students who studied abroad who actually decreased in proficiency in the foreign language because they never interacted with native speakers, or if they did they only did in English.

*I was actually shocked how my ERASMUS friends in Belgium would just go up to the bartender, waiter, whatever and just order in English without as much as a single attempt to speak the foreign language. Myself I never spoke English with anyone unless that person explicitly stated they wanted to practice their English. My husband made me do all the talking which is why he never learned. It was also difficult in group situations because groups often revert to the main language of the group so French, and this meant that while I could contribute to the conversation someone had to make an effort to use English to communicate with him. It was actually rather anxiety-inducing and resulted in my husband choosing to often not go out with our friends. But you can't force someone to learn the language if they don't want to and my husband did not want to learn French.

Viktor77 wrote:While I do agree that you make some good points here there's one thing that I'd argue with. I'm not sure that a speakers only have one vocabulary. I am not read up on code switching as I said as it's not my area of study, but I do remember attending a conference presentation where the speaker, a well known sociolinguist, was talking about the rules of code switching so while my memory is rusty this means to me that speakers draw from two vocabularies and code switch for a reason, not that they simply look for the best word in one large mix of vocabulary.

As I said, this used to be the consensus among sociolinguists but there's plenty of evidence against it going back decades. I would point you to Woolard's work among Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (one of the first authors to get me to question the markedness model I'd been taught) and, once again, to the work being done on urban multilingualism in Africa and Asia.

I took notes on the code-switching I observed while living in Europe. A lot of it was motivated by lexical gaps, as you and others have observed (e.g. "Mensa", "Schein", "Aufenthaltserlaubnis", "Bächle", "Kopfsalat"). But a lot wasn't. There's no "rational" reason to say "Let's beweg[*]!" or "I'm going to tire some argent"[**]. You can call the first "playfulness" and the second "laziness", but I'm not sure those labels get us much closer to what's actually going on in these circumstances.

Imralu wrote:It's a bit weird when a monolingual English speaker from my old life is in town and I stell fest that I can't talk like this and there are words for things that I'm forgetting or getting out of the habit of using, or don't even know what they are in English.

That affected me for years after moving back to the US. I remember well one particular incident where I was typing an e-mail to some friends in a hurry and I couldn't think of an English equivalent for ausführlich so I just typed that. The reason I remember it was that I got so much shit from them for doing this, since none of them were bilingual so they had trouble seeing it as anything more than an affectation on my part as opposed to just a brain fart. Even now, twenty years later, I still find myself putting German vocabulary into LEO to find English equivalents so I don't make this mistake again.

Texting would be so much easier if I could just use whatever words first occurred to me instead of struggling to express myself entirely in one language or another.

[*] Stem-form of German bewegen "move".
[**] French tirer argent "withdraw money" [i.e. from an ATM]

Home now, here's the post I was writing ... I was in a ranty mood this morning.

* * * * i

clawgrip wrote:It happens all the time in Japanese. Some of the reasons are:

- As mentioned above, using these words can be cool or hip, while the native word may sometimes feel stuffy, old-fashioned, traditional, etc.

As a native English speaker in Germany, this drives me mental, mostly because I obviously don't share this idea that English is cool. (For me, native language = boring.) What drives me crazy are things like "chicken" used in German, which has more than enough words for chickens of various genders plus words for the meat as opposed to the live animal and then they add [ˈt͡ʃɪk̚ŋ̩] to the mix. As a native English speaker, I really resent having to learn what German gender each arbitrarily borrowed English word has. The thing that's usually told to me is that the gender comes from the closest equivalent German word, so for example, it's der Food Court because of der Hof, but for one thing, this is not always true (der Drink versus das Getränk, der Song versus das Lied) and for another thing, if I'm going to have to think of the word Hof to use court correctly in German, can I please just use Hof since you've made my brain reference it anyway?

I do however, find endless amusement in terrible Denglish and pointless misslungene borrowings. There are so many places that use the German element Back along with an English word making something that makes no sense at all if you don't speak German. I love to recalque these back into German - Backfactory (Rückenfabrik, Back Lady (Rückendame / Hinterdame), Back to go (zurück, um zu gehen). And there's a Messe (see below) that happens every year called Boot & Fun (Stiefel & Spaß), which disappointingly nothing to do with s&m but a Messe for boats ... with the randomly borrowed word fun for absolutely no reason except that it is apparently cool, even though English speakers are all like "WTF is that about?"

And then there's a company which runs pay-for-use toilets* at big train stations called Rail & Fresh (Schiene und Frisch) which is not awkwardly mixed with German but it's just ridiculous because it's to random English words vaguely connected to the idea of what it is - linking a noun and an adjective with "and" just doesn't make any sense. Cat and happy. Bed and early. It just sounds so stupid to me.

*And since I'm clearly in a ranting mood, pay toilets are the thing I hate most about Germany.

clawgrip wrote:- The speaker perceives some nuance in one word that they feel works better in their sentence.

For whatever reason, the word in one language slipped their mind, but the word in the other language did not, so they just switch languages for that one word.

That second point is the main reason I code switch although there's no hard line between these two points. All of the people I regularly speak English with can also speak German reasonably well and I struggle to find words a lot in any language, which I think is the main reason why I prefer to write than speak face to face or on the phone.

In any case, here's a sample of words that I pretty much always end up saying in German other than the obvious S-Bahn, U-Bahn kind of words.

Messe - trade fair ... which I have never said in my life as far as I know, and can never think of. (EDIT: OMFG, they're also called conventions, which is something I have said but can still never think of it ... to get there, my brain went to Messegelände, then I strained to remember the name of the big "Messegebäude" in Brisbane and after a bit of brain pain, I remembered it was called the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre... and then I located "convention" in that and realised that's the word for Messe that I usually use in English. Well done, brain - this is why I code switch.)
Stammtisch - regular meetup with a group of people at the same place
Im Nachhinein - retrospectively ... for some reason, I can never think of this word, like, ever, even before I knew the German equivalent. By mistake, I often end up saying posthumously instead, which is awks.
Baumarkt - hardware store ... store feels awkward to me but hardware shop is not a thing, and in Australia, we just say Bunnings or Mitre 10 because there are really only two chains.
Vermieter - landlord
Mietvertrag - rental contract
Hauptmieter - lease holder
Untermieter - subletter... but I don't think that's a word. E.g., I live in a WG with two other guys. One of them is the Hauptmieter and us other two are Untermieter.
WG [ve:'ge:] - sharehouse
Zweck-WG - a sharehouse where the people live together out of necessity rather than because they like living with people, generally with minimal contact
Zwischenmiete - temporary rental arrangement - staying in someone's place while they go on holiday or something
Hausverwaltung - body corporate (now that I think of it, why is it called the "body corporate"?) building management
Hausmeister - building manager
Haustür - door to the whole building
Anmeldung - registration of your address
(un)befristet - (not) limited to
angestellt - employed
freiberuflich - freelance
Imbiss - place that sells cheap food, usually chips, sausages, chicken, Döner etc.
Apotheke - chemist's, pharmacy... basically just because I don't like saying pharmacy and not everyone understands chemist. It's kind of like the Baumarkt thing - I feel like I have to betray my dialect to be understood, so I betray my whole language instead.

I've noticed, if I want to use a German verb in English, I'll often say the whole clause it's in in German because it can feel a bit weird to adapt them to English ... I remember saying to my flatmate once "I didn't mitbekommen that at all" and it was weird and I had to just say das habe ich gar nicht mitbekommen straight after it because it felt too awkward and hard to follow. My brain was kind of torn between saying "didn't bekomm it mit", "didn't mitbekomm it", or "didn't it mitbekommen" and they're all awkward. It actually took me a few days to find the closest way to say that in English ... pick up on? Mitbekommen felt closer to what I wanted to say than anything I could think of in English.

When I'm speaking German, the main one I can think of is that I say always talk about when I was in der Highschool because I didn't go to a Gymnasium, Realschule, Hauptschule, Gesamtschule etc etc, so there's just no German equivalent. My education went Grundschule, Highschool, Uni(versität). I also use words like remembern because the German equivalent used in some contexts (sich an [ACC] erinnern) is completely ridiculous, and also sometimes things like about jemanden caren or goen because I miss these sometimes, but these are never spontaneous and always meant as a joke, so I don't know if that counts as honest code-switching or just bilingual language play.

Imralu wrote:I've noticed, if I want to use a German verb in English, I'll often say the whole clause it's in in German because it can feel a bit weird to adapt them to English

Yeah, I have the same problem. The usual solution seems to be to use the stem form. In most cases, this is identical to the 2S imperative, which makes it sound odd to me, but at this point I've seen so much use of the "Erikativ" on the Internet that I'm growing accustomed to it.

Imralu wrote:When I'm speaking German, the main one I can think of is that I say always talk about when I was in der Highschool because I didn't go to a Gymnasium, Realschule, Hauptschule, Gesamtschule etc etc, so there's just no German equivalent.

When I first started speaking German, I overtranslated in order to avoid the impression that I was ignorant of native terminology. It took me a while to learn what borrowings were generally acceptable. I don't mean just which ones were in use, I mean getting a feel for what nonce borrowings would strike native speakers as natural and not gratuitous of affected. I still think I err on the side of not using enough English (since, as with Imralu, it has no inherent coolness factor for me and a lot of usages just sound silly).

Imralu wrote:so I don't know if that counts as honest code-switching or just bilingual language play.

And I don't know if a principled distinction can really be drawn between these categories.

linguoboy wrote:And I don't know if a principled distinction can really be drawn between these categories.

Yeah, you're probably right but they kind of feel like I'm doing different things. Everything I mentioned above that is something that happens fairly naturally and not so deliberately, just the result of scrabbling around for words in my messy brain and trying to use the words that are closest to what I mean.

Things like goen and about jdn caren are not just something I find in my brain but something I create more deliberately, not only to fill a gap but also to draw attention to the gap, and it feels quite a bit more meta... but yeah, I can't really find a hard line between what I'm seeing as two categories of things. Remembern seems to be on the edge of this. I don't so much use it to draw attention to a gap as there is no gap - German divides up the semantic space of "remember" a little more finely than we do (sich an etwas erinnern, etwas behalten, sich etwas merken, etwas noch wissen) but I usually use it for syntactic reasons, when I arrive at the end of a sentence and I want to lay down the verb but I've already used a direct object, no preposition, no reflexive pronoun, so to use sich an etwas erinnern would require me to either repeat or awkwardly drop missing elements at the end of the sentence, so I just kind of flip the table and use what I perceive to be an obviously far superior word.

The distinction between these two categories that I'm seeing is probably just the degree to which it feels deliberate in my head and how much meta-thought there is alongside it - what I feel is "genuine" code switching is fairly spontaneous and the only meta thoughts that usually accompany it are things like "I can use this word because it will be understood" or "dammit, why can't I find the English word?" (or "Is there even an English word for this?") and in the second category, it's more like "gee, this language is ridiculous and I want to show these Germans that we have a word in English that says exactly what I mean." I only ever have thoughts like this when I'm already pretty frustrated with my ability to express myself - which is partly just part of my personality and partly the fact that I'm using my L2 most of the time in my daily life. And I think this only started happening after a point where I consciously realised that there is no shame in being a foreigner and I'm completely entitled to make mistakes and if my German is not perfect and people are confused because they first thought I was German that's their issue and blammo, we have some good words in English too.

I think the line between code-switching and bilingual word play varies from person to person. For example, finlay's acquaintance who inserts 合わせ in the middle of an English sentence seems rather obnoxious to me and I would not do something like that unless I were joking around. But there is no real quick equivalent in English for this verb, so it makes sense to use it, and I understand exactly what the person means. Nevertheless, I find this sort of usage a bit obnoxious and would not do it myself. I have overheard people speaking English but occasionally adding conjunctions or certain sentence-final elements, though I feel like this is sometimes done by people who are not especially fluent and want to use what little they know.

At work now, holder post for my thoughts on the "Arabizi" (English-Arabic code switching) that I've noticed among English-language students of Arabic and Arabs (especially Egyptians).

clawgrip wrote:I think the line between code-switching and bilingual word play varies from person to person. For example, finlay's acquaintance who inserts 合わせ in the middle of an English sentence seems rather obnoxious to me and I would not do something like that unless I were joking around. But there is no real quick equivalent in English for this verb, so it makes sense to use it, and I understand exactly what the person means. Nevertheless, I find this sort of usage a bit obnoxious and would not do it myself. I have overheard people speaking English but occasionally adding conjunctions or certain sentence-final elements, though I feel like this is sometimes done by people who are not especially fluent and want to use what little they know.

I tried at first to resist putting ne or yo at the end of English sentences, but it's too easy a habit to pick up...

But in all seriousness, I do do this sometimes. "Matomeru" is another verb that doesn't have a convenient exact English translation, or I often forget that I could just say "collect" and end up inserting the verb.

Also I have heard "true" bilinguals (sounded native in both languages), two Japanese girls sorting next to me on a train one time who were speaking English but doing the conjunction thing because there's no exact equivalent to だし

clawgrip wrote:Do any people here code switch in their day-to-day lives?

Yes, I do this with my parents (and with Malayalees in general) all the time because it is practically impossible to speak Malayalam without code-switching between that and English at least to some degree, but these days I try to avoid doing it with my dad at least because I want to improve my shitty Malayalam vocabulary and his is relatively strong. Besides, he appreciates wordplay and literature in his native language (and to some extent, even in English, but that's just not as much fun).

This whole 'one vocabulary' idea certainly lines up with my own experiences both with Welsh and with Arabic. With Welsh people tend to switch happily from one to the other quite a lot with no obvious 'motivating' conditional factor. With Arabic-English bilinguals I have observed the same thing, and I also find that words I learnt naturally in Arabic (as opposed to e.g. from wordlists), which I also often struggle a lot to identify English translations for, I often feel the lack of in English, perhaps because I don't really perceive them as part of an entirely separate linguistic system. And when I am around Arabic-English bilinguals I tend to fall a bit into their way of speaking and give into the temptation to use these words (which is probably a bit pretentious, but what are you gonna do).

finlay wrote:I tried at first to resist putting ne or yo at the end of English sentences, but it's too easy a habit to pick up...

But in all seriousness, I do do this sometimes. "Matomeru" is another verb that doesn't have a convenient exact English translation, or I often forget that I could just say "collect" and end up inserting the verb.

Also I have heard "true" bilinguals (sounded native in both languages), two Japanese girls sorting next to me on a train one time who were speaking English but doing the conjunction thing because there's no exact equivalent to だし

When I was taking an English exam three years ago, I was guilty of putting a Polish “że” unconsciously as an interjection in the middle of English sentences.

I've held different jobs where all the terminology and communication is in English and I'm perfectly OK with work-related code-switching but it always drives me nuts when people start replacing basic everyday vocabulary with English words and it's especially ridiculous when they do it outside of work, it's not even cool and trendy borrowings. I've noticed the worst offenders are ALWAYS those who don't have the best command of English/native language and I actually find it quite intriguing just what exactly happens in their pea-sized brains, they don't even spend that much time immersing themselves in English (virtually). Is having two sets of vocab too much for them or what?!

Sometimes you do forget the native word though, I remember when I returned from my last trip to Germany I just couldn't think of the word for lighthouse so I translated literally the German Leuchtturm but that was on my first day back after two weeks of only speaking English and occasionally German and my mind was still there when I was explaining about the place with the lighthouse but this just doesn't happen to you every day.

Imralu wrote: Vermieter - landlord
Mietvertrag - rental contract
Hauptmieter - lease holder
Untermieter - subletter... but I don't think that's a word. E.g., I live in a WG with two other guys. One of them is the Hauptmieter and us other two are Untermieter.
WG [ve:'ge:] - sharehouse
Zweck-WG - a sharehouse where the people live together out of necessity rather than because they like living with people, generally with minimal contact
Zwischenmiete - temporary rental arrangement - staying in someone's place while they go on holiday or something
Hausverwaltung - body corporate (now that I think of it, why is it called the "body corporate"?) building management
Hausmeister - building manager
Haustür - door to the whole building

How about Hausordnung? It's perfectly translatable into English but it's such a German thing I'd want to use the German word.

Viktor77 wrote:I was actually shocked how my ERASMUS friends in Belgium would just go up to the bartender, waiter, whatever and just order in English without as much as a single attempt to speak the foreign language.

In Denmark I saw bartenders/waiters who didn't speak Danish and those weren't places that catered to some ethnic community or whatever, I was surprised because I can't think of many other countries where they'd hire on such positions people who don't speak the local lingo but I guess the Danish are pretty realistic don't necessarily expect foreigners living in their country to learn that awful language.

Pole, the wrote:When I was taking an English exam three years ago, I was guilty of putting a Polish “że” unconsciously as an interjection in the middle of English sentences.

We had an Italian girl in my German language course who'd always start reading with poi or alora and she always added syllables to words too. It was actually quite endearing and she was just adorable.

On the other hand Poles always pronounced the ich-Laut as [ʃ], so annoying... why can't they just say [x] instead?!

Io wrote:In Denmark I saw bartenders/waiters who didn't speak Danish and those weren't places that catered to some ethnic community or whatever, I was surprised because I can't think of many other countries where they'd hire on such positions people who don't speak the local lingo but I guess the Danish are pretty realistic don't necessarily expect foreigners living in their country to learn that awful language.

Danish isnt awful!

But I saw this in Amsterdam. I went to an Italian pizza place across from the Red Light district and I tried to speak Dutch (because I wanted to practice) and the guy said 'no Dutch, only English.' I was a bit shocked TBH.

On the other hand Poles always pronounced the ich-Laut as [ʃ], so annoying... why can't they just say [x] instead?!

Are you sure it wasn't actually [ɕ]? I think it's the default way ich-Laut is taught in Poland. [ʃ] belongs to a different phoneme in Polish, so it would be weird to use that one.

Danish isnt awful!

Danish is kamelåså.

Yeah, could have been that, I hated listening to it and I didn't pay much attention. And it's pretty appalling that's how it's taught.

Io wrote:Yeah, could have been that, I hated listening to it and I didn't pay much attention. And it's pretty appalling that's how it's taught.

Isn't that a variant native pronunciation?