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One of the curious pleasures for an amateur linguist is to live (like the majority of the world's peoples) in a bilingual community. In the part of Wales in which I live there is a long and rich tradition of completely mixing the two languages - here (with a blunt language warning) is a sentence I actually heard last night in The Black Lion on Cardigan High Street:
“Well, apparently aeth e lan i’r Wine Bar a cafodd two shades of shit ciccio mas o ‘i, see?”
aeth e lan i'r renders as he went up to the, and ciccio mas o 'i is "kicked out of him"... the conclusion with see? is use of an English lexical item in a characteristic Welsh tag.
After spluttering in my beer, I fell to wondering: does anyone else live in a community where this sort of language mix and match is observable?
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does anyone else live in a community where this sort of language mix and match is observable?
I useta when I lived in Flagstaff, AZ. Back and forth tween Spanish and English three four times in a sentence, with a little adoption of English words into a Spanish inflectional style. I remember the word juquiado in an anti-drug comic book put out by some local governmental organization. It comes from English hooked written Spanish with the Spanish past participle ending. Linguists call the switching back and forth code switching. The juquiado thing is known as Spanglish.
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does anyone else live in a community where this sort of language mix and match is observable?
Well, yeah. It's more common outside the pale and in the more rural and Gaeltacht areas but my Gaelic isn't good enough to give any examples. However....
There is this pretty good (black humour) joke someone sent me a while back which does offer an example. Translations by PM (or later in the thread).
Bhi beirt fear I.R.A. ag siul sios an bothar i mBeal Feirste agus chonaic siad fear amhain ina seasamh in aice an balla.
Duirt fear amhain ar an fear eile,
"An ceapann tu go bhfuil an fear seo ins an U.V.F.?"
"Knee ceapaim"
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Linguists call the switching back and forth code switching
I'm familiar with this description, but there are other things going on here too ~ the insertion of one language's lexical items into an alternative grammar, the reshaping of meaning of a lexical item... (let's see who was paying attention in other and past threads!)
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Southern Brazil (on the top side of the world nod to our antipodeans) is a melting pot not unlike the US. In the big cities there you'll hear a lot of Portuginglês... I spoke it frequently. In the smaller, more linguistically isolated towns to the extreme south of the country, populated largely by descendents of German and Italian immigrants, what you'll hear largely is wot Mav said: in this case, Portuguese words inserted into grammar of origin. One of my favorite examples of this I heard in a tiny Austrian-settled town called Treze Tilias (Dreizehn Linden), an admonishment to shut the window because the rain was coming in on the sofa cushions: "Fech die janelen, es chuft auf den almofaden!" 
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When I was living and studying in Germany, switching between languages mid-sentence was definitely the norm.
Amongst the foreign students (of all nationalities) it happened because the only common languages were German and English - with varying degrees of fluency. If you couldn't think of the word in whichever of the two languages you happened to be speaking at the time, you threw it in in the other language.
Amongst the English-speakers the most common reason for using the German words/phrase instead of the English was that the meaning didn't readily translate or referred to something very specific and as a result had more effect in its original language.
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Bien, of course, mon chou Quite common in French/English Montréal.
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bel reminds us: Bien, of course, mon chou... Quite common in French/English Montréal.Yeahbut* y'all're hors concours.  ~~~~ *I'm on a non-Mac at the library and don't know how to copyright mav's legitimate claim to coinage.
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I'm on a non-Mac at the library and don't know how to copyright mav's legitimate claim to coinage.
So do what Apple always does and tsuwm.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Heard on the radio this morning: "air minum, obat-obatan, pakaian bekasor whatever."
drinking water, medicines, old clothes or whatever
The presenter was definitely an Indonesian.
Bingley
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