Ack, I guess I should have spelled that with a hyphen. Here's the Wikipedia article, but basically it's when multilingual people switch between languages within the same conversation.
One of the things it mentions in that article is that in the past linguists considered it substandard language use but they've since come to believe it's a normal thing that's appropriate in some contexts. A lot of US Latino writers have grown up not only being told by English speakers that they shouldn't speak Spanish but being told by Spanish speakers (especially upper-class Spanish speakers) that they shouldn't code-switch, that their way of speaking and writing is inferior to real. Spanish. Mixing Spanish with English in their literature can be a way of contesting that voice of authority, of saying, "No, my language is legitimate." For me that makes the situation of Latino writers using Spanish a lot different from British authors using French, though I can see where it would be equally frustrating for some readers.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-05-24 11:13 pm (UTC)One of the things it mentions in that article is that in the past linguists considered it substandard language use but they've since come to believe it's a normal thing that's appropriate in some contexts. A lot of US Latino writers have grown up not only being told by English speakers that they shouldn't speak Spanish but being told by Spanish speakers (especially upper-class Spanish speakers) that they shouldn't code-switch, that their way of speaking and writing is inferior to real. Spanish. Mixing Spanish with English in their literature can be a way of contesting that voice of authority, of saying, "No, my language is legitimate." For me that makes the situation of Latino writers using Spanish a lot different from British authors using French, though I can see where it would be equally frustrating for some readers.