In many bilingual communities of Puerto Rican Americans living in the mainland United States, people use both English and Spanish in a single conversation, alternating between them smoothly and frequently even within the same sentence. This practice—called code-switching—is common in bilingual populations. While there are some cases that cannot currently factors, either situational or rhetorical, explain the use of code-switching.
Linguists say that most code-switching among Puerto Rican Americans is sensitive to the social contexts, which researchers refer to as domains, in which conversations take place. The main conversational factors influencing the occurrence of code-switching are setting, participants, and topic. When these go together naturally they are said to be congruent; a the setting “beach” yielded less agreement on the third factor of topic and on language choice.
But situational factors do not account for all code-switching; it occurs even when the domain would lead one not to expect it. In these cases, one language tends to be the primary one, while the other is used only sparingly to achieve certain rhetorical effects. Often the switches are so subtle that commented that it was used to express certain attitudes such as intimacy or humor more emphatically.
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