"Ate! Mag-read na tayo ng story!"

In the days that I had read to Mabie, I've came to realize how fond my cousin is of code-switching. She tend to code-switch at any chance that she got. She often use the Filipino verb tense morphemes "nag-" and "mag" like "nagbrubrush ng teeth" and "magreread ng story" . I tried to do some readings on code-switching and I found out that the way my cousin code-switches falls under the mechanism called nonce borrowing where in she would use English words together with tagalog affixes. This comes from the framework of Poplack ad Sakoff (1988). Their theory included 3 other mechanisms, which, however, were not exhibited in the speech of Mabie. The other mechanisms involved a greater control of both the two languages, for instance, the mechanism of smooth switching where in one may code-switch between syntactic boundaries which occur in both languages. (Poplack and Sankoff, 1988). Since Mabie still needs a longer period and more efforts before she fully acquires English as her second language, it is not surprising that she is able to codeswithch only by borrowing a grammatical unit or a word. Nevertheless, I was astounded by the fact that the way this young girl speaks is so similar with the way other college girls speak. I intentionally asked Mabie why she said things like "magreread" instead of "magbabasa", and all I got from her were utterances showing that she was either clueless or hesitant to answer my question. Code-switching seems to be one deeply-rooted linguistic habits among Filipinos, to the point that my young cousin is also employing code-switching as her communication strategy (if we try to look at it at the positive side.) However, there are chances that code-switching makes someone sound as if he or she needs to polish on his or her diction. In the case of my cousin, since all of the code-switching that she did involved a switch between a Filipino morpheme to an English verb, it can be concluded that at the time that she spoke those words, the English word first came to her mind (we can assume that she knew the Filipino word for "read", etc.) thus it was more convenient or easier for her just to say "mag-reread" instead of "magbabasa". Thus, Mabie may be employing a mechanism of code-switching in order to more easily express herself.

Poplack, Shana and David Sankoff. (1988). "Code-switching". In Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, and Klaus Mattheier, eds., Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society, second vol., 1173-1180. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.