Saturday, January 14, 2012

Code-switching between English and Spanish

Bilinguals, and multilinguals alike, often tend to switch between languages when the opportunity arises. While sometimes this phenomenon comes from an uneasiness in a specific situation when one language better fits the needs, it is always a sheer pleasure to speak in that intermingling mode with someone else who knows the involved languages. You can directly translate idiomatics which would not make any sense in the word-by-word translation but are a genuine word game you have to decipher in real-time. Most of the time, otherwise, multilinguals have to put strict barriers between each language, thus they kill this way that freedom of speaking in tongues which can be so joyful.

In her book Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories, the author Susana Chávez-Silverman uses a personal language which intermingles American English from Los Angeles and Castillan from Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is a true pleasure to read it in both Spanish and English at the same time, as it is listening to it.

You can find her book at Amazon.com

She also wrote Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters in the same style.

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