Tag Archives: Language

Code Switching

Posted on by
Reply

When I was a student, years back, my school had an ‘English Only’ policy. What this meant was that we could only speak English while in school. If teachers found students talking in any other language other than English, they would punish the student. However, this enforcement was possible only in kindergarten and primary schools. By the time we reached secondary school, we were effortlessly speaking multiple languages with each other – English when speaking to our teacher and a mixture of English, Hindi, Gujarati and even Parsi when speaking with each other. What we didn’t know then was that we were actually code-switching!

 

What is Code Switching? According to Wikipedia, “in linguistics, code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation. Multilingual speakers of more than one language, sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other.”

Code Switching happens in societies which are multilingual in nature, so you see a lot of ode switching in places like Mumbai and Singapore which have people living in close contact who speak different languages. I guess it also happens when people who speak multiple languages live and work together. I’ve been known to speak in English, Hindi and Tamil all in the same sentence!

While working, when I have colleagues who speak Hindi or Tamil, I more often than not speak to them in those languages, especially when we want to speak things we do not want the others to know about, switching to English when another colleague joins us. I see this a lot here in offices here when ethnic Chinese people usually speak in Mandarin, but here, many do not speak English when others who don’t know the language join them.

 

GG code switches more than BB moving between Mandarin, Singlish and Standard English. I am pretty particular about not using Singlish at home, but I am sure both GG & BB code switch between Standard English and Singlish when they are out with friends. This is actually fairly common in Singapore, where Singlish (or Singapore English), a colloquial version of English is the localised version spoken here. While English is the official language of business, Singlish is the language spoken between friends and while relaxing at home with words borrowed from Mandarin, Hokkien, Malay and Tamil.

 

When people are skilled Code Switchers, it allows them to connect culturally to people immediately. When you travel, when you hear Singlish or even Hinglish (the Indian version of Singlish), you immediately know you are among friends. It also allows you to make friends easily, especially when you and the person opposite you speaks a similar language. Code Switching also allows you to fit in immediately in a new environment.

 

I realise this when I go to Mumbai, I immediately start speaking in Hindi over English, even with friends with whom I’d text in English. I assume the reverse would happen if we go to a predominantly English speaking country – we’d automatically start speaking in English and also possibly start mimicking their accent.

 

I think back and realise we do this without realising it – one of my old bosses was a Brit and when I spoke to him, I realised my accent had become more crisp, almost copying the British accent.

So do you Code Switch? I’d love to hear your views on this interesting phenomena!

Languages

Posted on by
Reply

Language: The ability to acquire and use a complex system of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system.

Human beings, unless living in a completely isolated environment use language innately – when a parent coos to their baby, they are laying the foundation for the language they are native speakers of in the baby.

Most people (around 40% of the world’s population) are very fluent in a single language, usually called their mother tongue, many are bi-lingual (around 43% of the world’s population) which means they are fluent in two languages, usually English and their mother tongue, few are tri-lingual (around 13% of the world’s population), very few people are multi-lingual (around 3% of the world’s population) meaning they can speak four languages fluently and miniscule percent of the world population (less than 1%) can be called polygots or someone who can speak several languages fluently.

Most people in Singapore are bi lingual, speaking two languages with ease, English and their mother tongue, depending on what that is. Growing up, I guess most people around me were tri or multi-lingual – knowing English, Hindi, their mother tongues and to some extent the state language of Marathi. Although notionally my mother tongue is Tamil, the languages I think and dream are English and Hindi as these two were the languages we used all the time – in school, outside and even at home. My paternal grandfather, a product of the British education system, insisted I and my sister speak English to him and the English had to be grammatically correct. For a very long time, I could not speak to him in any other language other than English and it was only a few years before his death, we started speaking to him in other languages, specifically Tamil. My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, used to speak to us in Tamil, which to this date is not too fluent for both me and my sister. My parents, used to speak to us in a mixture of languages – both English and Tamil.

When we started school, it was frowned upon to speak any other language other than English in school and so this started a life-long love for the language. Like I mentioned earlier, I think, feel and even dream in English, so can this be called my native language?
Living in culturally diverse city like Bombay meant that you had to speak another language to engage with others – this usually was Hindi and with neighbours belonging to the Northern part of India, it meant my Hindi also achieved that level of fluency. Friends also cemented this level of fluency and thus I can comfortably claim to be bi-lingual, maybe tri-lingual (can I be that if I can’t read or write Tamil?).

Other languages I have a passing level of fluency to are Marathi (my home state language), French (this was my third language in school and college), Malayalam (from neighbours) and Kannada (my grandparents moved to Bangalore when I was in elementary school and yearly holidays to the city ensured I learnt a bit of the language).

Yesterday morning while S was driving me to work, the local Tamil radio channel was on. During the morning show, one of the DJs was, using the wrong way to pronounce a certain alphabet. Now this is going to be difficult to show here – there’s a letter which is a very guttural Y, but many people can’t speak it as it should be spoken and instead pronounce it as an L, which is wrong. This DJ, on national radio was continuously pronouncing words with this letter wrong. I am surprised that for a country which prides itself on it’s national bi-lingual policy allows someone to get away to speaking wrong on air like this. Also surprising is that till date, no one has come forward to correct this person as I am sure many eminent speakers of the language are probably tuning into the station!

OK, here’s a bit of language trivia – Do you know which the most widely spoken languages in the world are? By the number of speakers in descending order you have:

  1. Mandarin Chinese
  2. Spanish
  3. English
  4. Hindi
  5. Arabic
  6. Portuguese
  7. Bengali
  8. Russian
  9. Japanese
  10. Punjabi

No big surprises there to see Chinese at the top and 60% of the top 10 languages are from Asia!