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Juntos pero no revueltos:

Code-switching between Spanish and English in Northern New Mexico

Did you know?

When talking about your parents in New Mexican Spanish, mi dad is preferred over mi papá, but mi mamá is preferred over mi mom.
New Mexican Spanish has widespread borrowings from English like dad, but bilinguals also borrow words spontaneously, integrating them perfectly into Spanish grammar, like when someone says unas carrots grandotas.
Bilinguals can switch back and forth between their languages while keeping both languages intact.

Questions about bilingualism

Does code-switching between two languages promote convergence, where one language becomes grammatically more similar to the other? Not in northern New Mexico. When we analyze hundreds of thousands of bilinguals’ own words, we find patterns of linguistic variation that differ between the languages. Bilinguals keep their linguistic systems separate and intact even when using words from both languages in the same sentence. The message is that bilinguals who regularly use Spanish and English don’t mix up their languages, they mix and match.

A picture of green and red peppers, with three boxes. Top being red saying English, the middle being yellow saying Juntos pero no revueltos, connected but not confused, and the third being green saying Espanol

Data and Method

Evidence comes from community-based data and the analysis of linguistic variation. The New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual (NMSEB) corpus records bilingual speech through sociolinguistic interviews. Variation within each language serves to gauge grammatical similarity across languages. We compare:

Bilingual varieties with monolingual benchmarks, to determine whether there is change;
Monolingual benchmarks with each other, to distinguish language-specific from cross-linguistic patterns;
Bilingual varieties with each other, to assess whether the two languages as spoken by the same bilinguals are more similar than the monolingual benchmarks are to each other and, if so, how.

Graph explaining the bilingualism variants that exist when two languages are present

Comparisons to assess bilinguals’ grammars

Learn More

Our Book

Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2020. Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge University Press.

Reconsidering convergence

Plenary, International Conference on Historical Linguistics (2017, University of Texas). You can watch that here.

Bilingual clause combining

Team members presented on code-switching between clauses at the 2022 HDLS conference in Albuquerque. You can see the slides here .

Code-switching metrics

We were at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2023. You can see the poster here .