Spanish and English[edit]

Researcher Ana Celia Zentella offers this example from her work with Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilingual speakers in New York City.^[11] In this example, Marta and her younger sister, Lolita, speak Spanish and English with Zentella outside of their apartment building.

Lolita: Oh, I could stay with Ana?

Marta: — but you could ask papi and mami to see if you could come down.

Lolita: OK.

Marta: Ana, if I leave her here would you send her upstairs when you leave?

Zentella: I’ll tell you exactly when I have to leave, at ten o’clock. Y son las nueve y cuarto. ("And it’s nine fifteen.")

Marta: Lolita, te voy a dejar con Ana. ("I’m going to leave you with Ana.") Thank you, Ana.

Zentella explains that the children of the predominantly Puerto Rican neighbourhood speak both English and Spanish: "Within the children’s network, English predominated, but code-switching from English to Spanish occurred once every three minutes, on average."^[11]

• Tag-switching is the switching of either a tag phrase or a word, or both, from one language to another, (common in intra-sentential switches).^[24] In Spanish-English switching one could say, "Él es de México y así los criaron a ellos, you know." ("He's from Mexico, and they raise them like that, you know.")^[28]