Code Switching - Up close and personal
I have to admit that watching my son’s language development
is absolutely amazing. I grew up in “one language” household. My family used
English. Now, my family in Japan uses both English in the house and outside as
well.
My son is now a newly minted 3 year-old. As I’ve mentioned
before, his first language is Japanese and his second language is English. His speaking skills are quite high and
it is clear that he can communicate much more fluently in Japanese, but what I
have noticed recently is the dramatic increase in his code-switching skills.
In linguistics, code switching is switching between two or
more language varieties, in the context of a single conversation.
When my son was only one year old he started conversing in
both English and Japanese with family and friends. At that point he didn’t
realize that there was a difference between the two languages he was learning. He
would speak to his little friends in a mixture of English and Japanese and they
would just look at him blankly. Their Japanese skills were also just emerging,
but of course, they didn’t understand any English. Not long after he was two
years old, a switch in his brain was flipped and he realized that when he was
at the local kindergarten, community center or playground with his friends and
their mothers, he should only speak Japanese.
The most basic and obvious examples of code switching with
my son are in the home when he interacts with his mother, who is Japanese and
myself. When I come home from wok in the evening, he runs down the hall yelling
“Hello Daddy” and then he commences to tell me about his day’s adventures in
English. When I respond to him in English, he runs back down the hall and tells
my wife what I just said, but in Japanese.
At the dinner table he sits at the end and we sit on either
side of him. The majority of his day is spent “living in Japanese” so when I
come home my wife and I speak English to each other and to my son (and now
daughter). We haven’t set an “English Only” rule in our house that some other
people do. We just tend to use English because my Japanese skills are not
strong. Also, even though I am currently learning Japanese, I choose not to use
it around my son since his only daily opportunities to hear natural English are
with me.
Our normal dinner experiences are in English. At times
though, my son will tell me a story in English and then immediately turn to his
mother and repeat the story in Japanese. Other times, he will share it with her
in English.
Watching his code switching skills evolve is a constant and
wonderful process.
You can follow me on Twitter: @jlandkev
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