The Pros And Cons Of Codeswitching

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Codeswitching is the practice of alternating between one or more languages or varieties of language in a single conversation. Codeswitching often and naturally ensues amongst those that are bilingual and trilingual. Codeswitching commonly happens when people are speaking their non-native language and do not know how to translate a word from their non-native language into the language they are speaking. From the evidence gathered from my three colleagues; Anh, Aldina and Ane we will examine codeswitching on an academic but also more of a personal level. As a side note and a way to further support these claims we will also be using quotes from two academic journals as well as a textbook. Is codeswitching a sign of incompetence or something more, …show more content…

209). This seems to be a fairly common thing to do among the codeswitching community. The Meyers-Scotton article addresses this by saying codeswitching is more common in certain cultures and is “used to signal their perceptions or desires about group memberships.” This leads me to another example provided by Anh where she writes “There was one time my friend and I notice a hot guy walking towards us and we switched into Vietnamese: “Cậu ấy đẹp trai thế!” (Means he is so handsome!)” She said that in her culture they generally codeswitch when they want to discuss something without the non-native speakers knowing what they are saying. Aside from that alone, after interviewing my colleagues and reading their very detailed and specific examples as well as the examples provided in the two academic journals and the textbook this also seems to be a common thing for codeswitchers of any culture to do. It does not seem to matter what they are talking about or where they are in the world, if they want to discuss something with people near them that do not seem to speak their native language they will intentionally switch languages just to conceal their

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