I recently sat marvelling at my sister’s culinary expertise as she followed an English recipe to bake a traditional ‘kejk’ in Maltese. In the span of a few minutes she had bought margarine and icing sugar in English, but ‘dqiq’, ‘zokkor’ and ‘bajd’ in Maltese, weighed her ingredients on a ‘mizien’, and blended them together using a ‘mikser’. I have been raised in an environment which allowed me to acquire English and Maltese separately. On an immediate assumption, therefore, I would have asserted their independent function. However, a closer examination of their daily interplay reveals a different scenario.

Far from being reserved to those using two languages exceptionally, bilingualism represents a fact of life for almost half the world’s population, numerous social classes and different age groups, since these rarely exist in complete isolation from other people and cultures. The birth of Maltese, the widespread use of English in the country and the effortless and unconscious switching of both languages in conversation as a result of language contact continue to confirm this as the norm, rather than the exception.

Although frequent explanations for code-switching (i.e. the alternate use of two or more languages in the same utterance or conversation) are that it compensates for a lack of language proficiency, or that it conveys a sense of mental laziness, sometimes it seems to be unavoidable, since English has not ceased to make its mark on the mother tongue, mainly through lexical borrowing.

I have recently attempted to investigate what bilinguals think about their speech production through their own interpretation of bilingual data. Qualitative research consisting of utterance observations in different domains contributed to the initial stages of the research. Code-switched expressions were recorded, categorised and later presented in a questionnaire to obtain information about respondents’ attitudes towards these naturally-occurring utterances as expressed through different guises.

Tolerance levels toward code-switching were affected by different types of code-switched expressions in conversation, the function they serve, or the domain in which they are being used. Although participants set high linguistic standards for education and public domains, high levels of tolerance were noted in cases of ‘baby-talk’ or counting, where the ‘easier’ English word is chosen in favour of the Maltese version, as children are being prepared for their first years of schooling.

Acceptance of language mixing was noted in cases where technical terminology was uttered in English during conversations in Maltese. Rather than demonstrating a lack of competence, this may often reflect a need to sound less wordy in conversation, by using code-switched terminology that sounds easier on the ear. Additionally, it may also reveal the natural development of a language as it lexically and grammatically integrates terms for which no equivalent is found.

Although language development should never be an excuse for substituting already-existent Maltese terms with English vocabulary, this type of code-switching indicates that Maltese is no longer the same as it was a hundred years ago, since it is enriched through the adoption of foreign terms.

The different categories and tolerance levels analysed demonstrate how code-switching behaviour is not random, nor is it exclusively a sign of linguistic deficiency. It is complex, yet governed through context, and while negative attitudes are often harboured towards it, most probably few listeners would, in a real conversation, even notice such interferences.

Dorothy Bezzina

This research was funded by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship Scheme (Malta). The scholarship is part-financed by the European Union – European Social Fund (ESF) under Operational Programme II – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, “Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life”.