Growing up, being bilingual was barely anything I felt was unique or something I wanted to brag about. To me, it was the norm. I had never thought about how complex it was until I really started looking at what was happening inside of my brain.

I moved to America when I was only 4 years old, and when my family first came here, none of us spoke any English. After all of the Blues Clues episodes I had watched and my first year in kindergarten, I was pretty much fluent within a year. My parents, on the other hand, had it differently. It has been 17 years since we’ve moved to America, and they are nowhere close to fluency as I am. Because of this, I’ve had to be the impromptu translator in many different situations, even when I was 6 years old. Although my parents tried to preserve my mother tongue, because of my environment and my social group, English became a more predominant language for me. Also, all of my closest friends were Indonesian-American too so we were all kind of in the same bubble: English being our second language but also our more fluent language. Then, interesting things would happen to our conversations. We would mix up our English and Indonesian words while we were speaking, purposefully. I do this more often with my parents. Just yesterday, I said “Itu headboard ngk muat di kamar, kebesaran.” In this example, I replaced the Indonesian word for “headboard” to English. I clearly did this because I didn’t know the term for “headboard” in Indonesian and when I speak with my parents, this is typically why. This is called code-switching.

Code switching is when a word or a phrase in one language is substituted for a word or phrase in a second language (Li, 1996). It occurs in bilinguals and people usually don’t expect it to happen because recalling a word from a second language takes more time and work that recalling a word from the same language. To recall a word requires the use of one’s memory. There are 3 parts to memory: encoding, storage, and retrieving. Encoding is processing and learning, storage is the consolidation of memory, and retrieving is remembering back to what was stored (McLoed, 1970). The most important phrase for bilinguals is the last phase: retrieval.

Most people say the reason they do this is because they lack fluency in one of the languages and have to replace words that they don’t know for words they do know from their more fluent language. According to Heredia and Altarriba (2001), when Spanish-English bilinguals are asked why they code-switch, their most common response is “lack of formal knowledge”. When they say lack of formal knowledge”, they are saying that they don’t know the proper way to speak in one or both of those languages. But there are weaknesses to this. One of the weaknesses is that it doesn’t take into consideration that the speaker could be at the tip of the tongue (TOT) stage. This is when the speaker momentarily forgets a word or a name for something that they actually do know (Thompson et. al., 2005). It is possible that bilinguals could be in this state when they code switch and the word that they can remember is in the other language they speak which causes the code switch.

Another reason why code switching occurs is because code-switching still acts in respect to grammatical structure. So to say that speakers who code-switch have a “lack of formal knowledge” would be inaccurate (Heredia and Altarriba, 2001). For example, Bahasa Indonesia, the language I speak, and English have a different grammatical structure. In English, adjectives come before nouns and in Bahasa Indonesia, adjectives come after the noun it is referring to. But when I’m speaking in Indonesian and code-switch to English, I substitute the English word in where it would go with proper Bahasa Indonesia grammar. So in this case, you can see that although the word itself is switched, the grammar stays the same so there is formal knowledge of the language that the word or phrase is originally spoken in.

Woolford (1983) supports this idea by stating that this idea is true because grammatical form of fragments of sentences are not affected when the fragments of different languages are next to each other to form a complete and understandable sentence. Woolford constructs a model to interpret Spanish-English bilingual code-switching that interprets how it occurs. She finds and supports previous research that says that there are constraints to code-switching and her model takes into account some of these restrictions. Her model shows that new bilingual phrase structures can be drawn freely from each grammar but the word of each grammar can only be filled with respect to the phrase structure rules from the same language. Also, the word that is added has to be inserted in the correct grammar of the original language that the speaker started with. When the code-switching word is being added, the rules of the hybrid sentence also has to be the same as a monolingual sentence (Woolford, 1983). This research helps further understand how code-switching works linguistically but more research needs to be done to address more rules that occur naturally in code-switching.

Another questionable aspect of code-switching is that if it takes longer for people to read and interpret sentences with code-switched words then how does it occur so naturally in speech? In a model proposed by Macnamara and Kushnir (1971), they found that it took much longer for people to read and understand the sentences because both linguistic systems can’t be active simultaneously. This could be interpreted as one linguistic system being turned on and the other being turned off at one point in time, so the switch would take longer than just taking from one linguistic system. Why, then, does code-switching happen so quickly if it takes longer to process? This, I have not found any information about yet, but hopefully more research will come that explain this idea.

Code-switching has also been thought of as a negative take on language. People have thought of it as a sign of language decay and assuming that it negatively effects the proficiency in one or both languages (Aitchison, 1991). But is this true? Parama et. al. (2017) conducted a study that observed monolingual and bilingual perceptions of code-switching. The participants completed a series of questionnaires that identified if they were monolingual or bilingual, their fluency levels, and also one measuring their perceptions of code-switching after watching a video of 3 bilinguals that switched codes. The video was of Bangla and English bilinguals. They hypothesized that monolinguals would give lower ratings than bilinguals, given the previous research, when being asked about code-switching and competency but their results showed that there was no significant difference in this effect. This means that people most likely don’t think very negatively about code-switching but it doesn’t mean that they think of it in a positive light either. There were some limitations to this experiment. One of them is that none of the participants could speak or understand Bangla which could cause some confusion and could effect the results. All in all, it is nice to see that maybe people are more open minded and understanding than what prior research suggests about code switching and competency.

My parents have been in between this idea for me. In some cases, they look down on my code-switching from Indonesian to English. They think its because of my poor Bahasa Indonesia language skills but there is research that says otherwise. Other times, they are grateful that I do this. It helps them understand different ideas better when I explain in both languages. But in no way have they ever thought that either language was being decayed in doing this. If anything, they are glad that I am still using my Bahasa even when I’m around my friends, whom I typically speak in English too. They say that it shows that I’m practicing and they know that I still understand and can use my Bahasa that I never really formally learned.

Code-switching is a complex process in which bilinguals use both of their languages in one phrase or sentence by substituting a word or a phrase from one language into a sentence of the other. It’s something I have much experience with because of how I grew up. Extensive research has been done to answer questions as to why this occurs? The most popular explanation to why this occurs is to “compensate for lack of language proficiency” (Heredia & Altarriba, 2001). But there are a couple weaknesses to this explanation. One of them is that it doesn’t take into consideration that bilinguals could be caught in a tip of the tongue (TOT) state, when speakers temporarily forget a name or word that they are sure they know. They could temporarily forget the word in the language they started in and in turn, they switch to the language they do know the word in and replace it there. Another weakness is that the explanation assumes that no proper structure is being used because of a lack of formal language knowledge which isn’t true of code switching. It actually still occurs with respect to the proper grammatical structures that should occur even in monolingual language and speech. All of this information is important in understanding that code-switching is dynamic and could possibly not be a negative trait of a bilingual. It shows complexity and is still proper in its own way. More research should be done to find more support for this idea because according to prior research, code-switching shows decay in language and has a negative effect on language competency. Fortunately, this isn’t the popular consensus as seen in the research conducted by Parama et. al. (2017). Hopefully, further research will be done to help grow the understanding of how code-switching works which focuses on its benefits rather than its disadvantages to show that bilinguals who code-switch are no less competent compared to bilinguals who don’t or to monolinguals.

Reference List

Aitchison, J. (1991). Language change: Progress or decay? (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Heredia, R. R., & Altarriba, J. (2001). Bilingual language mixing: Why do bilinguals code-switch?. Current Directions In Psychological Science, 10(5), 164-168. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00140

Li, P. (1996). Spoken word recognition of code- switched words by Chinese-English bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 757–774.

Macnamara, J., & Kushnir, S. (1971). Linguistic in- dependence of bilinguals: The input switch. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 10, 480–487.

McLeod, S. (1970). Stages of Memory. Retrieved December 10, 2017, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/memory.html

Parama, K. S., Kreiner, D. S., Stark, K. S., & Schuetz, S. A. (2017). Monolingual and bilingual perceptions of code-switching: A difference in cognition but not competence. North American Journal Of Psychology, 19(1), 87-101.

Thompson, R., Emmory, K., & Gollan, T.H. (2005). ”Tip of the fingers” experiences by deaf signers. Psychological Science, 16, 856–860.

Woolford, E. (1983). Bilingual Code-Switching and Syntactic Theory. Linguistic Inquiry, 14(3), 520-536. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.unh.edu/stable/4178342