Monolinguals often assume that this kind of switching happens because speakers are not competent in one of their languages - a sort of deficit hypothesis - or because a concept just can’t be expressed in one of the languages - a sort of lexical gap explanation. Analysis of recorded multilingual speech doesn’t support these ideas, however. Speares who code-switch the most often are usually those who are the most fluent in both of their languages, and there are linguistic rules about where in a sentence a switch can happen.
-- Van Herk, What is Sociolinguistics, chapter 11 (via @femmefuriosa on instagram)
this is super interesting to me because my family and i do this all the time and i had assumed the deficit hypothesis mentioned above as the reason why because of my own perceived shortcomings in my speaking ability, but that never made sense because it doesn’t explain why my parents do it too.
can anyone out there give me a quick lay-person’s explanation as to which rules determine where the switching can happen?
