Code Switching with The Rock Sauce

It was another late night in the KAMP Student Radio broadcasting booth, more commonly known by KAMP sound engineers as the "hot-box." The air conditioning unfortunately turns itself off after the stroke of 5:00pm to save the electricity bill which left me, Matt Brailey (a former KAMP engineering director) and local talents The Rock Sauce sweating amidst the towering amps and medusa-like XLR-cables protruding from the mixing board. Our only distraction from the boiling heat was the band's entertainment and thank G-d they were good!

After a good 30 minutes of high-voltage tracks and hilarious conversation, the guys decided to slow down the mood a bit with a song called "Ale Alo." In a heat exhausted daze, I swayed back and forth checking the levels on the board and monitoring the computer read-outs. I pressed my left ear against the headphones resting on my left shoulder to check the vocal levels and noticed the words seemed jumbled in some way. I couldn't place what the disturbance was at first. Was it the microphones? No. The volume was just fine. Was it the computer mangling things up? No. The read-outs were fine. Finally it hit me: they had switched to Spanish! In one fluid motion the lyrics shifted from English to Spanish with barely enough time for me to recognize the switch.

Pictures of The Rock Sauce performing at KAMP Student Radio
(Taken by Stefanie Weiser)


I remembered just a few days earlier a friend of mine at work, who was bilingual in Spanish and English, also caught me off guard with a Spanglish conversation. I started to wonder whether there was a pattern to this. Do all bilingual speakers subconsciously bounce from language to language? Furthermore do other bilingual speakers understand the jumbled hybrid-language?

After a bit of research I found the answer was astoundingly yes! According to a Texas A&M International University Web site, "speakers of more than one language (e.g. bilinguals) are known for their ability to code-switch or mix their languages during communication." Originally researchers believed the reason for switching between languages in mid thought was because the individual was not entirely proficient in either language and therefore substituted words from both "mental dictionaries" to complete his or her thought, according to the Web site. However, recent studies in psycholinguistics indicate that code-switching is more of a byproduct of the individual's consistent interaction with both languages. In other words, a bilingual individual's mental word banks are not separate entities after all. In fact, they blend together in everyday use, thought, and apparently, music!