Essay On Code Switching

According to Gumperz, code switching is defined as “the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems.” Many people believe that most code switching occurs at random or without pragmatic significance (Poplack, 1985), while others believe that every case of code switching has some significance to it (McConvell, 1988). Gumperz is somewhere in the middle, saying that “just because code-switching conveys information, does not mean that every switch can be assigned a single meaning” (Muñoa Barredo, 1997; 529). With this approach in mind, I examined the transcript of the conversation between Mary and Paul for any significance in the switches that were made between

English and Spanish. What I came up with was this:
For most of the switches, I was able to find a meaning behind it. The main speaker, Mary, switches into Spanish, which seems to be the language in which she is most emotionally expressive. The first switch to Spanish occurs in line 5, then in line 6 she switches back to English, “Estos ... me los halle ... estos Pall Malls me los hallaron. No I mean that’s all the cigarettes ... that’s all. They’re the ones I buy.” Here she switches to Spanish possibly as like a figurative parenthesis. The question Paul asked her was what does she smoke now. She could have just said in English, “That’s all the cigarettes I buy,” but she included the part about how Pall Malls “found” her in a way that slightly illustrates her emotions. From reading the sentence in Spanish, the reader can detect a sense of guilt from Mary, almost as if she is ashamed or embarrassed that she smokes the Pall Malls. She does not leave her answer at just, “That’s all the cigarettes I buy,” because it lacks emotion and motive.
She continues in English until the middle of her sentence which is separated into lines 8 and line 9, then she switches back to English in line 10, “I mean it wasn’t an effort that I made que voy a dejar de fumar porque me hace daño o this or that, uh-uh.” Here she switches to Spanish, possibly to accurately recount what her thinking process could have been when deciding to stop smoking.

This recount can also be expressed in a single language, but it is not as obvious, for example, “This is the bakery that we came to when we first started dating.” In this sentence, from the word “that” and onward the speaker is talking about something that happened in the past and provokes the listener’s mind to flashback to when the speaker first started dating. The same thing occurs here but in a more abstract sense. From the word “que” and onward, the listener is encouraged to imagine what could have been in this instance, instead of what actually was like in the example. Mary could have come up with different reasons to stop smoking, such as it affects her health, etc. She could have thought, “I’m going to stop smoking because it’s bad for me,” some time in the past. This is why she switches to Spanish, because her reasoning back then if she had taken into account the risks of smoking would have been in Spanish, the language that is most influential and emotionally connected to

her.
It seems to me that Mary’s use of code-switching in some places is strategic, and in other places not as much. For example, lines 12-15 do not seem to have a specific reason for switching languages, other than the assumption that what is said in Spanish may be easier to say in Spanish than in English, or that the speaker may just be vacillating between to the two languages