Trying to language

This is such a specific pet peeve that I know is petty but

As a linguistics major who is also trilingual and has real life experience code-switching (changing from one language to another) mid-sentence on the daily, one of the BIGGEST bothers to me in fanfics is when it happens unnaturally. 

I get that we all think ‘wow, a character suddenly speaking in another language is sexy ;)’ but the truth is, there are natural AND also really awkward and unnatural ways to codeswitch, and unless you have first-hand experience, there is a high risk that your sexy insertion of a foreign word in the middle of a sentence is actually making someone who speaks that language natively cringe just a little bit.

And - I want to make this clear - that’s not your fault! It’s a difficult thing to write well. 

There is no singular ‘right’ way to do this! Even people who speak the same language will speak differently. Dialects, personal verbal habits, etc, all exist! So naturally this can be stretched. 

However, there are typically more ‘natural’ patterns of when people codeswitch - flip from one language to another. 

✪ Mutual bilingualism ✪

Situation: Two or more people both share a second language, aside from the ‘lingua franca’ 

Most of the time, if you are both speaking, you will pick a language and stick to it. Not because it’s impossible - just because it’s easier. In most cases, it takes more braincells to switch between languages than it does to continue in the same language. (*Remember this later, this is important.)

However, a common thing that happens is that one person will speak one language, and another will use the second one. 

If they both mutually understand one another, this is not an issue, and a comfortable way to converse. This happens often with bilingual kids who talk to their parents. They may speak in English to their parent, who will respond in another language. 

For example, conversations between my mother and I frequently take this format:

Text: A conversation between two people. The one on the left side of the screen is speaking in Russian. The right side is answering in English.

However:

When code-switching does happen, it happens most often:

at a paragraph level (starting a new topic in a different language)

at the sentence level (starting a new sentence in a different language)

at the clause level (switching mid-sentence, but after a comma)

at a word level (BUT only in specific cases! More on this below.)

in that order of frequency. 

For example, THIS type of codeswitching:

Text: (In English:) “There’s no snow, so we’re all good! I’m ready whenever you are” (New line, in Japanese:) “When you’re finished, I’ll be on the left side right outside that same exit.”

is proportionately more common than THIS:

Text: (In Japanese, except the bolded parts) “Does that sort of meme exist?” “Huh? Oh… no, wait. Why ‘Amazing Grace’?”

“But wait! What about words? Don’t people constantly insert words from foreign languages into their speech?”

Sure, they do. This happens all the time. 

Under the right circumstances. 

For example:

When you are trying to name a specific place or location which would not have an immediate translation

When you are a using a cultural word specific to a certain language (such as an artifact that only exists for one culture, or a specific holiday which doesn’t have an immediate translation into Common). 

When you are swearing, and you have a strong preference for a swearword in one language

When you are specifically teaching someone a word, or explaining a word from one language

Example: If I want to tell my mom I’m playing DnD with friends, so I can’t call her right now, I will say ‘DnD’ in English, because there isn’t any other way to say it.

Text: “(In Russian) Can I call in 5 minutes?” “Can we do it tomorrow? I’m playing (in English) DnD (in Russian) right now.” “Gotcha.”

HOWEVER, of course weirder examples exist. 

The prime ones are when you can’t remember a specific word in one language, and HAVE to dip into the reserves of the other. This happens to me constantly. 

Text: In russian, this says “I dunno, it just seemed very….. sudden. lol” - the word ‘sudden’ is not the Russian word for ‘sudden’. It’s just the English word ‘sudden’ transliterated into cyrillic, because I blanked for a moment and forgot how to speak.

OR when a you just pepper in a specific word because the ones in English will not convey the message properly:

Text: “How’s [NAME REDACTED]?” Reply: “(In Japanese) Otsukaresama!” which translates loosely to ‘hey, you worked hard, you deserve a break, etc’ but doesn’t have a direct translation into English. “He’s good. Seems (in Japanese) genki.” Again, the ‘genki’ here is a specific mood that I associate with that word, and felt couldn’t be replaced with the English equivalent.

Of course, this is somewhat terrible in showing you SPEECH patterns, because texting and speech are quite different. 

But the points you need to take away is: 

Very few people will codeswitch in the middle of the sentence without a good reason to do so. If you have a character who is trying to confess their love, unfortunately it IS unrealistic to have them go

“And I…. must confess that… Я люблю тебя.”

It looks cool, but it’s not actually intuitive. Of course, anyone CAN do it. But it has to be a very conscious choice. No one would do that on accident. It’s not actually easier than simply staying in one language and continuing to finish “I love you.” 

Similarly, most people DON’T drop in and out of languages several times in one sentence. 

It’s just not useful, and it actually takes more brainpower to do so. 

(To those of you yelling: But I do that! - I ask - but how OFTEN? Sure, I’ve also weirded up my language. Sometimes, my mom and I make Frankenstein sentences which are REALLY weird. But it’s not a constant thing. It’s usually a one-off.)

Sorry, these are a a real bitch to transcribe, but suffice it to say that this is an English-Russian soup.)

….

These are prime examples. They absolutely DO happen— (

….

wait for it…

…

….

WHEN BOTH SPEAKERS NATIVELY SPEAK THE SAME TWO LANGUAGES.

This brings me to a very important point:

If your character, who is bilingual, is speaking to another character, who would NOT understand them…………….. there’s a good chance they’re being a bit of an asshole.

Look, here’s the thing.

I live with my partner, who speaks Japanese and English fluently. I also speak Japanese at a conversational level, and English fluently. 

I also speak Russian at a native level. He barely knows much of it at all.

The amount of times I insert random Russian phrases into my conversations with my partner?

Once a month. Tops. 

(Once, I tried to teach him how to say ‘I love you’ - [ Я тебя люблю ] in Russian, and he mispronounced it as [ Я тебя убью ] ‘I’ll kill you’ and it has been a meme in our household ever since. Shadowgast fans who write Essek speaking Russian, I give you this anecdote freely. Do with it what you will. It’s yours.)

It’s not actually conducive to conversations, and it’s not as natural as some fanfics might have you believe. And even in the throws of passion, it’s not really that easy. If you and your partner both know a common language, you won’t actually deviate from it unless you have a good reason. Such as, if you want to teach someone to say something in that language! 

…..and their pronunciation will likely be silly! (Nothing wrong with that.)

I have a complicated answer to this:

The truth is, this greatly depends on the person. 

So I know that as soon as I say my own opinion, I will have 50 people descend on me in rage, protesting the opposite. 

BUT - personally, I think petnames in a foreign language have to do the following things:

they have to be short enough to be usable. Long-ass nicknames in a foreign language will be clunky in the middle of the sentence, even more so than native-language nicknames

they have to make sense for the age/relationship/culture of the characters. 

Russian, for example, has thousands of petnames. But there are some that scream ‘I’m your grandmother!’ and some which have very romantic connotations. You have to actually ask native Russians if it works or not. 

Also - keep in mind that OVERUSING a petname is a thing! If you’re constantly using that word, every other sentence, it might become tedious to go back and forth between the pronunciation of one language and then back into another. If I call my Japanese partner a petname which has a specific set of sounds unique to Russian, my brain has to do the legwork of switching gears back into Japanese or English pronunciation. That takes braincells! Which I do not have!

However, that’s a problem that’s more unique to languages which are completely dissimilar in grammar and phonology. I’ve heard that it’s easier between languages which are more closely related, such as German and English, or Spanish and English. 

BUT for that I turn it over to you, fellow bye-linguals and try-linguals. 

It was mentioned above that switching at the level of the word or phrase is relatively rare: if you are going to write this at all, please be aware that when code-switching will happen is also fairly clearly linguistically defined. It’s not random.

At a lower than sentence level - so phrase, or word - code-switching happens most often between certain syntactic groups. You can think of these as like…mini parts of the sentence that can’t be separated without making the sentence meaningless. For example the sentence ‘I asked if he had already left’ can be separated broadly into [I asked] and [if he had already left]. Similarly, a sentence like ‘I fed the big white cat’ can be separated into [I fed] and [the big white cat]. ‘The’ is such a close part of the language that no bilingual would ever say ‘the große weiße Katze’ (big white cat). That’s just…no. 

It’s more complex than that, but for our purposes that’s enough.

Codeswitching at such a low level, as OP pointed out, is still fairly rare. BUT if characters do it at all, they will OVERWHELMINGLY choose to keep syntactic groups in one language and switch to the other language for the next. What does this mean? I’ll use English and German to demonstrate because they’re the languages I’m most familiar with (and have lived in multilingual environments with), and because the sentence structures are different enough that it proves my point. 

It still sounds a bit weird (like OP said. this kind of switching isn’t hugely common), but a sentence like

1) ich weiß aber nicht, if he already left (I don’t know if he already left)

would be MUCH more likely than a sentence like

2) ich do know nicht, ob he schon left hat (I don’t know if he already left)

That second sentence is a NIGHTMARE. It’s IMPOSSIBLE. No bilingual person would ever say that. Why? Because they’re breaking up the syntactic groups we talked about. ‘I’ belongs very closely to the verb; the negative belongs to the verb. People might separate them by mistake in what we call ‘online errors’ in the same way that native speakers sometimes make mistakes, but there have been extensive linguistics studies undertaken that all prove that generally speaking, code-switchers have pretty tight control over their languages. Even a sentence like the first one is unlikely. 

This brings me on to my second point. Codeswitching only occurs when it is grammatically permissible to do so. This means that, in practice, some types of code switching are more possible between certain language pairs (Hindi to Marathi would be a language pair; German-English, Russian-Turkish, Mandarin-Cantonese etc - all language pairs) than others, depending on what the grammar of both languages allows. Let’s look at this again with the example of German. 

German’s word order is different from English’s in quite a lot of ways. In main clauses the conjugated verb must be in second position in the sentence, and the non-conjugated verb (so the infinitive or the past participle) must be at the end. Like this:

3a) Gestern bin ich in die Stadt gegangen (yesterday am I in the city gone)

or this:

3b) Heute muss ich meine Hausaufgaben machen (today must I my homework do)

And in subordinate clauses - with words like ‘because’, ‘if’, ‘who’ etc - the word order is different again: the conjugated verb moves from second position to the very end of the sentence. So like this:

4a) …. weil ich gestern in die Stadt gegangen bin (because I yesterday in the city go am)

or this:

4b) ….weil ich heute meine Hausaufgaben machen muss (because I today my homework do must)

So what does this mean for code switching? In practice, it means that if I want to say a sentence like ‘I have to read this book’, the rules for English and German grammar come into conflict. English requires ‘to read’ to come after ‘have’ - but German requires ‘to read’ to go at the end of the sentence. Any attempt to code switch in the middle of that sentence is going to produce something ungrammatical for both languages - and so, generally speaking, German-English bilinguals just won’t do it. If they code-switch at all between clauses in a sentence, it will be in situations like 1) above - here there is a full main clause in German, and then a full subordinate clause in English. Both clauses are separate enough that they can follow their own grammatical rules without infringing upon the other language. 

A language like Spanish, however, is much more similar to English in terms of word order. So - and again, please let me stress that this is still not common - a Spanish-English bilingual could conceivably produce a sentence like:

5) I have to leer el libro (I have to read the book)

It’s still weird. Most people still won’t do it. But it is technically possible in a way the German-English equivalent wouldn’t be. This is worth bearing in mind: the more similar two languages are in terms of word order and grammar, and the less strict their word order is, the more possible code-switching at lower levels may be. 

But to be honest? If you’re going to write code-switching between languages at the level of the phrase rather than the sentence, my advice is: unless you already speak these languages to a decent level, or unless you’re someone with a pretty decent understanding of clause structure and the grammar of various languages….just…don’t. It’s hard. There’s a lot you can fuck up. It will annoy actually bilingual readers of your fic. And like we’ve said multiple times, it’s really not as common as you might think - it takes a lot of brain power. 

Ok. I’ve mentioned before living in an environment where I code-switched frequently, but I’m not a native German speaker. So let’s talk about which kinds of environments facilitate code-switching in non-natives as well!

First, though, I want to stress the following: that it’s remarkably difficult to change the language or languages you interact with people over a long period of time. Most bilinguals will probably agree: if you are used to speaking to someone in language B, even if two people speak the same language A, unless they are discussing specific cultural things or phenomena that don’t translate well into language B, they will pretty much always stick to language B. You end up associating languages with people, and it’s surprisingly hard to change once you’ve started. 

This crucially does not actually depend on your ability in the language. Even if you’re an intermediate speaker, if you have only ever spoken to your friend in their native language, it will feel very, VERY strange to switch to your native language - even if technically it should be easier for you. This is important when writing bilingual families: often parents will speak to their children in one language and the children may respond in another, but sometimes one or both parents may choose the language of the community to speak to their children in. This is particularly common when the heritage language is seen as ‘not valuable’ in some way, or the parents fear that it will slow their children’s development. Which is bollocks, by the way, for anybody curious. 

So let’s say we have Cantonese speaking parents in an English speaking country; they may speak Cantonese between themselves, and choose to speak English to the children even though it’s not their first language. (Equally, they may speak to the children in Cantonese and the children reply in English - it will depend on the family in question.) For the parents, changing to speaking to children in Cantonese, even if it’s their native language, could feel extremely strange. The children might find it likewise odd.

Code-switching happens most frequently when both or all languages are relatively active. This means that you use both languages often in your daily life - and once again, this is not restricted to native speakers. Code-switching would be expected and very common somewhere like the UN, where all workers must be fluent in French and English to business level - no matter whether you are a native speaker of one, or both, or none. If both languages are extremely active, it’s possible that even speakers who are native speakers of the same language will still switch into the other language on occasion, especially if it’s within a certain domain. 

A domain is a certain semantic area of language: so work, or school, or home for example. Domain-based code switching is very common - that means that certain things are spoken about in one language, and other things in the other. For example: a Turkish speaking family living in Germany with bilingual children might speak exclusively Turkish at home, but switch to German to discuss schoolwork or other things that are done exclusively in German. This is part of the reason that assessing fluency in heritage languages is difficult, because - just because somebody can chat casually with their family in Arabic doesn’t mean they can discuss what they’re studying at university, when their university studies are in French.

Let me give a few different situations from my own life where I have experienced code-switching to illustrate some of the points a bit more clearly: 

1) I am friends with a German scientist named Stefan. Me and Stefan met in China, and spoke English even though his English was worse than my German, because there were other people around who didn’t speak German. At first we would speak in German when we were alone. We then ended up going to the same university; as his English got better and everything we discussed (the domain of language) was mostly about university stuff, which is conducted in English, we switched to speaking English essentially 100% of the time. We have since travelled to Germany and Austria together, and still speak English together. The only exception is when we meet his friends and family. It would feel extremely weird to speak German to him now even casually - we never code-switch. 

2) When I worked in Germany, I lived in a flat with two German women and a Kenyan man called Wallis. Wallis spoke English natively and German to an advanced level. Because our work was 100% in German and our flatmates spoke to us in German, we also spoke to each other in German maybe 70% of the time even when we were alone - despite the fact that we were both native English speakers. For us code-switching was extremely common though there was a preference for German, and it felt strange to speak entirely in either language. 

3) My father had a French partner for many years; he speaks French to an advanced level, and at the time his partner spoke English to an intermediate level. All of her family were French speakers and didn’t speak English well; my brother speaks not a single word of French. At the time my French was intermediate. When we were all together, we all spoke French (rip to my brother). When me and my dad’s partner were together, I would speak to her in English (easier for me) and she would speak to me in French (easier for her). When it was me, my dad and his partner we would also all speak French, because when me and my dad spoke English it was too quick for her to understand. We never really code-switched; I would speak entirely in English to her (if we were on our own) or entirely in French (if we were in company). 

4) My partner speaks English natively and has spoken Irish non-natively to a high level all her life; my Irish is extremely limited. We both speak to each other in English, obviously, pretty much 100% of the time. But we often use particular endearments in Irish - I often tell her I love her in Irish, or that she is beautiful, and vice versa. Sometimes when she is particularly overwhelmed she speaks a bit in Irish, even though she knows I don’t understand, before switching to English. I sometimes do the same with German. It helps us collect our thoughts. For some reason this works for us: the endearments for me feel more distant, and is therefore easier to say (I am VERY shy about things like that), and for her it feels even more meaningful. 

You can see that pretty much every social situation is very different. It also depends hugely on the language situation of the country in question, the social status of your characters, the background of what code-switching means; if your characters are middle class from northern India, they will likely mix Hindi and English to an extremely high degree, to a way that characters who are not middle class, even if they speak English to an extent, likely will not. It’s a sign of being in the in-group; it’s a sign of prestige. Not all bilinguals are alike: a character who has Hindi as a heritage language will not mix it with English in exactly the same way as a middle class bilingual speaker in India who uses both languages at work, which will not be the same as two non-Hindi speakers who use Hindi in their workplace, which will not be the same as a non-Hindi speaker who learners Hindi for their partner….and so on. You get the picture. 

Language is an act of identity; code-switching, likewise, is an act of identity. Done poorly, and it risks insulting and alienating the groups of people you are trying to write about potentially as an outsider. Do your research, and use it well - when done properly, code-switching can tell us a lot about two characters and their relationship, and used as an excellent tool for characterisation. 

Hi anon!!! Ahh thank you so much for allowing me to ramble about linguistics <3 this got super long I hope you don’t mind!! I’m just really passionate about this topic lol but here are some of my favorite random facts:

Languages see colors differently! Russian, for example, has two different words for light blue (голубой) and dark blue (синий), whereas in English we classify them both as “blue”. Weirdly, English does distinguish between dark red and light red (“pink”). But some languages even group colors like green and blue together! Vietnamese, for example, uses the same basic word for both (xanh) and then additional descriptors for whether it’s light blue (sky), dark blue (ocean), or green (leaves). There’s a lot of debate on how language affects the way we see colors because of this. This is called linguistic relativism and it’s honestly fascinating! (Sources: x, x, x)  

You know that meme with the trolley problem? You’d probably think you’d give the same answer no matter what, right? But some studies have found that our moral decisions are sometimes affected if we’re speaking a second language! The theory behind this is that:

The difficulty of speaking a foreign language makes people pause and give the question more thought. Interestingly, this usually relates to utilitarianism! So, in the trolley problem, people speaking a foreign language are more willing to sacrifice one person to save many, for example, and/or  

Listening/reading in a foreign language often produces a lower emotional response than your native language! So, if you picked up your native language from your family, friends, community, etc. it has a LOT more emotional connections than a foreign language you learned in a classroom, for example. And these emotions can affect the way you make decisions! This is actually fascinating because it shows that our responses to moral dilemmas are not just about our values. They can also be affected by the language we’re using! Now imagine all the forums like the United Nations etc. where people from all over the world are constantly deciding on moral issues. How many of those decisions have been affected because they’re being discussed in a foreign language? Makes you think, right? (Sources: x, x)

Blind people actually gesture when they speak. So even people who have never seen someone else gesture will do it themselves, with the same frequency and types of gestures as sighted people! Not only this BUT different languages will actually use different types of gestures! So for example, to gesture that someone ran into a house, English speakers typically use one gesture, whereas Turkish speakers tend to separate gestures for both motion (running) and path (into a house). And the research showed that both blind Turkish and English speakers gestured in the same way as their respective sighted speakers! This is honestly so cool because it means 1) there’s something inherent about languages that makes people gesture to convey meaning! And 2) there's also something about the type of language itself that makes people gesture differently across the world. (Sources: x, x)  

Weirdly, spoken filler words like uh or uhm usually appear before nouns! As opposed to verbs, for example. The reason is that nouns typically convey additional information, so we normally have to pause to search for the right word. And precisely because we usually pause before nouns, this likely affects the way grammar evolves over time! This makes it more difficult for nouns to evolve to complex forms. In German for example, it’s much more typical to add prefixes to verbs rather than to nouns (ent-kommen, ver-kommen, be-kommen, etc.) Also this is completely anecdotal BUT when I was attending a university in Germany, I was shocked that the professors barely seemed to pause or use filler sounds as opposed to my native language. I thought a lot about this and the way I could explain it was like the language in the movie Arrival, where writing a word means you have to know how it ends. Some sentence structures in German actually end with the verb, so you have to know how your sentence ends when you start speaking! And that leaves less room for pause. So, the use of those filler words before nouns could change depending on the sentence structure of the language! Again, this is entirely my own experience, but it sort of matches up with the study, with less pauses before verbs. (Source: x)  

Sort of related to the point above, but filler words also change a LOT depending on the language! Some languages use mostly meaningless sounds like e in Spanish or euh in French. But some others like German often use modal particles, which are words that actually modify the meaning! But they’re mostly used for emphasis rather than actual meaning. Such as schon (kind of / actually) or eigentlich (actually). Here's a Wikipedia link with a list of some of the most common ones, it’s honestly one of my favorite features of spoken language: (x)  

Finally, I covered mostly scientific studies, but I also love works of fiction that touch on linguistics! If you’re interested in this topic I’d recommend:

Manhunt on Netflix, a series that showcases forensic linguistics

Arrival, the movie I mentioned above, is overall a pretty cool sci-fi take on how language influences the way we think and relate to the world

Last but not least, one of my all-time favorite short stories is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s about a fictional country where the language denies the existence of nouns. One hemisphere focuses on verbs and the other on adjectives. Which means there are no objects, only conditions, and therefore no object permanence. The original is in Spanish, but I found a link to an English version here. I honestly LOVE this one!

And if you're looking for even more educational content, I'd recommend you check out Tom Scott's videos on language. They're pretty well researched and he explains the topics in a very simple and clear way! (Link: x)

Again thank you for indulging me anon!! I could honestly go on even longer about linguistics but I have to stop at some point lol

In Russian, razbliuto refers to the feelings you have for someone you used to love

The "premonition of love," basically meeting someone & knowing you'll fall in love, is known as koi no yokan in Japanese

Greng-jai is Thai for needing help but not wanting to bother anyone else with it

These are seemingly universal experiences, but these languages took the opportunity to assign them a word. Perhaps the feelings are more common in these languages, or they hold more weight culturally.

English also has words that don't translate to other languages. A lot is slang that came from AAVE or queer communities, but other words like serendipity or hillbilly have no real meaning outside of English. These words evolved to fit our cultural experiences & share how we view the world.

Citations:

Slauer, S. (2019, October 9). 20 amazing words that don't exist in English - but really should. Insider. Retrieved December 12, 2021, from https://www.insider.com/words-that-dont-translate-no-english-equivalent-2018-9.

Government building at the end of working hours, 1962

Gro Harlem Brundtland and AUF leader Jens Stoltenberg on Utøya, 1987

Utøya and Oslo July 2011

On this day it is 10 years since the 22 july attack. On July 22, 2011, a far-right terrorist detonated a car bomb in the government quarter in Oslo, before driving to the Labor Party's summer camp for young people on the island of Utøya. 8 people died in the bombing, the massacre on Utøya lasted 66 minutes and 69 people, mainly teenagers, were killed.

The perpetrator was motivated especially by the racist Eurabia conspiracy theory and hatred for the Labor Party, Muslims, immigrants, feminism and social democratic Norway in general.

While the terrorist was motivated by hate, the civilian efforts to help the victims was impressive. In the government quarter people helped each other. On Utøya, as the kids tried to hide or swim off the island, despite the fact that the perpetrator was shooting, civilians in boats went out to pick them up.

Today we take a moment to remember the victims of this attack and all victims of hate crimes and political violence, rest in peace: