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Quote mesmark Interesting.
I've found that once you are bilingual and the person you are talking with is also bilingual, you tend to mix the two languages. |
Yes, I agree - my son and I do it with English and Italian all the time.
However, I don't think it is the same. What we say may be mixed, but is always grammatical in terms of one or other language. We might start a sentence in one language and finish in the other, or insert a phrase from one into the other, but not mix up the grammatical structures as in "Tu as sleep hier?" I could imagine saying "
Tu as dormi yesterday?" or
"Did you sleep hier?" but not creating a new past form which was a mix of the two. And that seems to me to be crucial - they've invented a new grammatical form
Have auxiliary + infinitive which doesn't exist in either of the two original languages. If you look at the other examples given, it's quite regular : S+avoir/etre auxiliary in French is
always followed by infinitive main verb in English -
tu as go / il est come etc. And presuming that these examples are representative, it always happens that way round - never for example
Did you dormi yesterday? Code switching is more random, in that I might say something in one language one day, and the same thing in the other language the next.
So Frananglais is regular, with definite rules that can be codified. Which presumably qualifies it as a new language.