On 5 March 2015 at 09:39, Emile van Sebille <em...@fenx.com> wrote: > On 3/4/2015 12:40 PM, Tim Delaney wrote: > >> A related thing is when you have multiple multi-lingual people talking >> together where at least two of their languages match (or are close >> enough for most uses e.g. Spanish and Portuguese). They'll slip in and >> out of multiple languages depending on which best expresses what they're >> trying to say, and no one will involved realise. >> > > Except for my poor grandmother who hadn't understood a word my mother had > said the previous ten minutes. :)
The phenomenon I'm talking about involves people switching languages mid-sentence without the participants noticing. It mainly occurs with people who grew up speaking multiple languages, and commonly switch between them in their thoughts. If your grandmother learned her second/third/etc languages after she was a teenager then it's likely she mainly thinks in one language and translates to others. It can also be seen with people who have recently had long-term saturation exposure to a second language - for example, exchange students who have just come back from a year's stay. When I'd recently returned from Brasil (20-odd years ago now ...) there was one time when everyone was a native (Australia) english speaker and had a mix of latin-based second languages - that was close enough for it to happen. Tim Delaney
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