Coming from a multi-lingual enviroment (my husband speaks several languages) It is said by those who are ignorant that learning more than one language at one time confuses a child. This is not true. But where they may get that idea is ithat n the initial stages of language development using more than one language the child will use whichever word they feel most comfortable with at the time, resulting in a mixture of language in the one sentence, but in due course as the child grows in fluency, he/she begin to distinguish the differences between the languages and separates them. Those who are ignorant are often quoted as saying this is language delay or deficiency. Totally not true.
I totally agree with this! Code-switching is actually a sign of language proficiency, NOT deficiency, because it's completely patterned or systematic (i.e., people aren't just throwing in verbs in random places). Check out this quote from the literature:
"Considered a chaotic practice, code-switching is seen by most nonspecialists as a sign of lack of mastery of either or both languages. Even a leading researcher on bilingualism has claimed that the ideal bilingual is someone who is able to switch between languages when required to do so by changes in the situation but who does not switch when the speech situation is unchanged and “certainly not within a single sentence” (Weinreich, p. 73). Specialists, however, recognize code-switching as a functional practice and as a sign of bilingual competence. The results of a groundbreaking study of the phenomenon, for example, provided “strong evidence that code-switching is a verbal skill requiring a large degree of linguistic competence in more than one language, rather than a defect arising from insufficient knowledge of one or the other. The rule governed nature of code-switching is upheld by even the non-fluent bilinguals in the sample” (Poplack, p. 255).
Code-switching - Approaches to Understanding Code-Switching, Spanish-English Code-Switching, Growing up Bilingual
As an English-Japanese bilingual myself, I know that there are lots of reasons to code-switch, many of which have ZERO to do with how well you know the languages. Sometimes the word or phrase simply doesn't exist in the matrix language, and sometimes the feeling or the mood you want to express works better in the one you code-switch into. I also think that people need to A) give up their monolingual bias and B) maybe rethink what it means to be "bilingual" or "monolingual." If native-level fluency is the yardstick, then probably very few people could actually consider themselves bilinguals.
Thanks for bringing this topic up, FF. I'm so interested in CODAs and bilingual/bicultural (multilingual/multicultural) experiences, and I hope more people will chime in on this.
(PS--Sorry to have been so absent on the board lately--I picked up an extra writing class at work, am back in session at UBC, and am going full-steam in my ASL class!! Crazy busy schedule, but I am lovin my ASL class. It is SO hard for me, but really fun, cool and interesting!)
