Garonne (garonne) wrote in linguaphiles,
2013-03-02 18:44:00
I'd like to know whether these are all examples of code-switching. (The examples are in French and German, but I tried to get the same idea across in English, too. Imagine that this is one language and this is another.)

1. Switching back and forth between languages at sentence breaks. (I know this one is code-switching.)
I went to the shop, and I saw my friend there.

2. Spattering sentences of one language with words from the other. (I think this probably is too.)
The bus was late so I didn't arrive until half past three and I couldn't buy your newspaper.
Le bus était verspätet, du coup je ne suis arrivée qu'à halb vier, et je n'ai pas pu acheter ta Zeitung.

3. Forcing words of one language into the other to the extent of conjugating or declining them like they were part of the second language. I do this and hear this all the time, but I never see it mentioned in discussions of code-switching. Does anyone know if it has some other name?
I was watching television when he arrived with the books.
Du musst devinieren, wer das ist. (French: deviner + German: -ieren)
Il spielait de la musique quand je suis arrivée. (Germen: spielen + French: -ait)

Also, if anyone has other examples of the third type of code-switching (or whatever it's called) using other languages, that would be cool and interesting to see.
Tags: code-switching, linguistics
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  • 28 comments

hkitsune

March 2 2013, 18:42:13 UTC 2 months ago

I think what #3 is, is what's usually called "XYish" -- Fringlish, Denglish, Franglais, etc. It's potentially a kind of code switching and I would say it is (not an expert, just a psycholinguist). As far as I'm able to search, it looks like "intra-word code switching". You might consider reading this paper:

Myers-Scotton, C., 1989. Codeswitching with English: types of switching, types of communities. World Englishes, 8(3), 333-346.

mamculuna

March 2 2013, 19:29:09 UTC 2 months ago

Myers-Scotton was my dissertation director! I was just going to refer to that book. See also works by Myers-Scotton in collaboration with Janice Jake. But it's not my field and I'm not sure what they'd say about it.

garonne

March 3 2013, 16:37:56 UTC 2 months ago

Thank you! I'm going to try and get hold of it. I don't know a whole lot about the field of linguistics, so I would even have known what journals to look in.

biascut

March 2 2013, 18:56:58 UTC 2 months ago

I first used Windows 95 and the internet and learned to edit photos, use HTML and design websites in Germany, on a training programme with several other English people. We used to say things like, "Well, that worked until I öffnened it in einem neuen Fenster" or "Hold on, it's just auflading." We'd generally be speaking to each other in English, but the actual teaching was done in German and obviously the written text on the screen and commands were all in German, so it was easier to stick to any technical terms in German with English syntax (although I think part of the reason it worked it because all of those things were exactly the same syntax as in English. It got well confusing if you started to mix up German and English word order.)

(I still think "ausschalten wieder einschalten" when things go wrong.)

thekumquat

March 3 2013, 10:32:18 UTC 2 months ago

Conversely, my PhD supervisor and examiner had German as first language, and knew I understood German even though I wasn't so good at speaking. Based in London all our tech and written papers were in English, so they would use German syntax with so many English words it sounded like an English dialect.

Though there were clearly native limits - for example they might say 'downloaden' or 'gedownloadet', but seeing it as a separable verb and saying 'downgeloadet' was apparently hysterically funny whereas the first two weren't.

garonne

March 3 2013, 16:43:04 UTC 2 months ago

Ausschalten wieder einschalten, the rule that solves every problem in life! ;D

crumplelush

March 2 2013, 19:45:54 UTC 2 months ago

I do that third one all the time with Japanese words. I'm often tabemasing or nomimasing at restaurants. Or yomimasing a book.

garonne

March 3 2013, 16:45:51 UTC 2 months ago

Hey, that's interesting. I was wondering whether it still happened with two languages that were much more different from each other than French and German.

shizuku_san

March 3 2013, 21:19:24 UTC 2 months ago

I immediately thought of the opposite.
At my university, the student post office was shortened to "SPO" which was also a verb ("I'll SPO it to you"). The Japanese exchange students called it SPOる

Or for a more general example, I thought of ググる (to google something), which akibare already explained below.

I think I'd call both of these just loanwords rather than code-switching though.

hoyland54

March 2 2013, 20:24:58 UTC 2 months ago

A sort of example of number 3: people I learned German with at a university in the US would say gecancellt or gecancelled as we collectively had a terrible time remembering absagen (for whatever reason, it was always the past participle we couldn't remember). However, it's an actual anglicism in German, I think, so we might have actually picked it up from the internet (I want to say my webmail uses 'canceln').

kirstenlouise

March 2 2013, 21:26:14 UTC 2 months ago Edited:  March 2 2013, 21:27:52 UTC

I have nothing productive to contribute to this discussion, but I have to say that "gecancellt" has to be the most adorable past participle I've seen since "gegoogelt".

I also have a huge soft spot for "nachgedacht".

rgovrebo

March 2 2013, 22:15:39 UTC 2 months ago

"gegoogelt"

In Norwegian the past tense of the verb google is "googla". There's actually a hilarious song called "Googla deg" ("Googled you").

muckefuck

2 months ago

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anicca_anicca2

March 4 2013, 21:20:53 UTC 2 months ago

I worked in a London hotel in the late 1980's, and my colleagues were native English, Italian, French, and German speakers.
We'd speak English, and we were actually forbidden to speak anything but English amongst ourselves (not with clients, obviously). But when working with other Germans, a typical sentence would have been "Ich type schon mal die arrivals' list."
("Type" as in "typewriter". Yes. Typewriter.)

mack_the_spoon

March 3 2013, 05:07:55 UTC 2 months ago

I'm currently doing full-time study of Lao, in Vientiane (capitol of the country). Before finally getting a motorbike/scooter to get around, I was taking tuktuks everywhere (Google 'em if you don't know what they are). They're SO expensive, especially for foreigners - at one point I told my teacher that I was "tired of jaiing so much ngun to get around", so I was ready to buy a motorbike. ("paying so much money", in case that's not clear from context!)

garonne

March 3 2013, 17:06:12 UTC 2 months ago

Hey, that's interesting! Am I right in thinking that Lao is a language where verbs don't get declined? Because when you're swapping verbs between e.g. French, German, Spanish etc. all the verbs have the structure root+ending. So it sort of makes sense to tack the ending of one language onto the root of another.

Then I was wondering what happens when one language doesn't decline. I mean, you wouldn't say "I'm tired of jai so much ngun to get around"?

mack_the_spoon

2 months ago

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muckefuck

March 5 2013, 02:06:06 UTC 2 months ago

This reminds me of the time I was in Paris with a friend who was studying there and he stopped as we passed by an ATM for his bank, saying, "Hang on; I've got to tire some argent."

mack_the_spoon

2 months ago

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5x6

March 3 2013, 05:33:13 UTC 2 months ago

All three are very common, but if I understand this terminology right, only the first one is called code-switching.

Incidentally, you can add a 4th pattern: inventing foreign words that do not exist or exist with a rather different meaning. Examples:

Handy (cell phone) in German.
Beamer (projector) in German.
Killer (hit-man) in Russian (only as a contract killer, not just a murder)
Bull-it (ice hockey penalty) in Russian (from a lone player looking like a bull attacking the goalie)

garonne

March 3 2013, 17:17:01 UTC 2 months ago

That's true. I didn't really think of that one.

I suppose the difference with the 4th pattern is that these words are "correct" and often found in dictionaries, even if sometimes frowned upon by people who are very conservative and protective of their language. (I'm thinking of the Academie francaise here! :) ) whereas the other 3 patterns would get red-pencilled if you tried to do that in an essay for school, for example.

Beamer is interesting because it's gone through German and back again to English. I know plenty of people who live in Germany and hardly speak a word of German, but for some reason they say Beamer instead of projector when they speak English! I suppose that sort of thing happens to a lot of words, actually...

x_reggg

March 3 2013, 05:50:09 UTC 2 months ago

I definitely do #3 with Cantonese and English! There's some more information here :D

garonne

March 3 2013, 17:09:35 UTC 2 months ago

Thanks!

odette_river

March 3 2013, 06:29:14 UTC 2 months ago

If I'm talking to someone who I feel is fluent in English and Indonesian, I sometimes do the third one. I know I used some weird construction last night. I can't remember what the actual word was, but it was something like dichange, with "di" being a prefix to make the verb passive but with the actual verb in English.

Strangely, I rarely go the other way, ie makaning in place of eating.

garonne

March 3 2013, 17:09:16 UTC 2 months ago

Yeah, if you know the other person will understand anyway, then sometimes it's just less effort to use the first word or construction that comes into your head ;D

tisoi

March 3 2013, 06:43:46 UTC 2 months ago

The third one is common among many languages. If you were looking for papers on the topic, I would try searching with keywords like productive verbal affixes and loan words. In Tagalog, for example, the prefix mag- is commonly used on loanwords to make verbs out of them, but the infix -um-, even less so. In Spanish, verbing loanwords is usually done with -ar verbs rather than -er and -ir ones. So from those two languages, you end up with (using "Facebook" as an example) - magfacebook and facebookear...

garonne

March 3 2013, 16:58:44 UTC 2 months ago

Hey, thanks for the tips.

That's interesting about Indonesian and Spanish. I read once that in French, all new verbs are always -er verbs, while the number of -ir and -re verbs remains constant. Even though -ir and -re verbs do have their own, regular, conjugations that could be used with loanverbs, so in principle there's nothing stopping new verbs belonging to those groups...

akibare

March 3 2013, 18:21:48 UTC 2 months ago

Famously, the company name "google" in Japanese ends in "ru" when pronounced Japanese style, and "ru" is a perfectly fine Japanese verb ending, so there is now a verb in Japanese "guguru" (ググる) which means... to google (which is a verb in English too!)

It conjugates like any other normal Japanese verb, so

guguru = to google
gugutta = googled (past/completed)
gugureba? = "why don't you google it?"

You can read about it at 日本語俗語辞書 (in Japanese).

Another word I just thought of now is スタンバる ("sutanbaru") from "standby" it means... to standby. 「ここでスタンバってます」(kokode sutanbattemasu) = "I'm standing by (here)"

There are a lot of words like this. Some of them eventually get able to be used in regular writing, like saboru (to skive/skip work or class), daburu (to double), etc.