Friday 3 May 2013

Language Mixing & Code Switching

Poppette is now 30.5 months old and, the more her language skills develop and the more able she is to speak in full sentences, I notice her substituting words from one language for another.

I can't honestly say what influences her choice as, often times, she knows the appropriate word in both of her languages.

The interesting thing for me is how she always manages to construct grammatically correct sentences even when mixing the two languages together.

I want to capture these so I can look back and smile, so I'm going to add them to my "Poppette & Little Man" page.

A couple of cute examples are:-

Pas go au lit [Je ne veux pas aller au lit]

Don't want it, go au lit. [Je ne veux pas aller au lit]

Ça va très fast [Ça va très vite]

Ça move [Ça bouge]

She also has some cute language quirks where she uses the structure from one language when speaking the other such as calling orange juice 'juice orange' [jus d'orange] or like this morning when she proudly announced "I make big sleep" [j'ai fais gros dodo] i.e. I had a big sleep!

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