Code Switching Essay

Mission Linguistic Observation-Code switching Hey! Hola! Bonjour! Namaskārām! One of the key skills of Anthropological studies is understanding linguistics. It is a given that language is essential to communication, since it is used on a daily basis. How one speaks to their friends may different than how they would speak to their family members, it all takes into play when talking about how people speak and communicate. For example, a student who comes from a bilingual family might speak another fluent language at home. This is the most common cases of code switching, the change in language or language variety in a conversation. Given an observation at a friend’s house: I used participant observation, to observe how my best friend talks to

She was now speaking Spanglish. She was laughing and replied to her in a mix of Spanish lexicon while speaking a bit of English in the same sentence, some of her Spanish lexicon included the words chancalas (flip-flops), loca(crazy),Hermosa(beautiful). At this point in the conversation her syntax is all thrown off, because Spanglish has its own set of rules and structure and doesn’t follow either of the two languages. She flips flops between the two languages, which is very common within bilingual families. When speaking to her cousin she was a lot more lighthearted and laughing, in that case her pitch got higher, became less serious with her cousin, her hands were all over the place, and the rate of her speaking increased. . A lot of people use code-switching for those reasons to create a connection, say things in secret, etc. From what we learned in class we know that the way someone speaks changes someone’s perspective on them. That’s why she spoke in Spanish to her family members instead of us, it was something between them a joke about their family, and it wasn’t like we understand fluent Spanish, all we understood was little to know Spanish. She used code switching in order to ensure comprehension with her family members, to make a connection with specifically her

This study focuses on the Puerto Rican language, race, and class. I chose this study to support my thesis, due to the fact that it relates to this specific observation of code switching within a bilingual Puerto Rican family. In the study overview given in the book she talks about how Puerto Ricans are told their English is Impure because it is mixed with Spanish. The parents in this study grew up In Puerto Rico, while their kids grew up here and were forced to learn English as a second language. The reason my best friend’s family tries not to speak Spanish in public is that Puerto Ricans just like all the other migrant minorities face that linguistic prejudice, they are told they won’t succeed having that Spanish accent. So they hide that part of them, just knowing that coming from a bilingual family, your culture comes out when you are with family or others like