Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Curious.
My SO is essentially bi-lingual in English and Spanish, She would have extended conversations with a Puerto Rican woman who worked at the laundromat close by when she did the laundry, and they would shift between English and Spanish, often not even consciously aware they had done so. They were simply talking.
But the shifts came at the boundaries of syntactic units. Complete thoughts were expressed in one language before shifting to another, and you didn't get the patois or pidgin that occurs when intersecting cultures devise a trade language in with both can communicate. There was nothing like Spanglish.
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What you describe here is what I'd call "efficiency switching"; your brain automatically switches to the other language (when you know your conversation partner knows both languages too) if the thing to express is e.g. shorter or more convenient to express in the other language - say names of institutions, or one of the languages has a shorter grammatical structure for questions, etc.
I know that too.