There is some interesting discussion about hybrid languages on episodes of the the World in Words podcast that I listened recently. One episode discuss Chiac, a combination of Acadian French and English spoken in New Brunswick in Canada.
Examples include:
– J’ai backé mon car dans la driveway
– Je prends un large double Americano pour sortir
This form of language has been around since at least the 18th century and is looked down on by many as being corrupted French. However people who speak Chiac also speak French and English and tend to do so with no Chiac-speakers.
Another episode discusses Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English spoken in California that dates back at least to the early 19th century, when California, and other southern US states, were part of Mexico, and it was common for people to speak Spanish and English.
You could view these forms of speech could be seen as code switching between different languages. However the switching seems to be quite systematic and not necessarily spontaneous.
Do you know of other examples of hybrid languages like this?
At the risk of being attacked on this forum these “languages” sound awful. I don’t really believe anyone REALLY talks like this other than for a bit of fun.
The people interviewed on the podcast talk like this naturally amongst themselves. It didn’t sound like they were doing it just for a laugh.
Such mixed languages are not uncommon in diglossal areas. For example, East Slavic languages have Surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian and Russian) and Trasyanka (mixed Belarusian and Russian).
San Antonio is a great place to hear highly developed Spanglish. You can hear it on the radio traffic reports: “I-10 is backed up donde conecta con 610.”
Jewish languages are like that, except that they can be a mixture of >2 languages. Pidgins are too, although you can argue they are different in that the pronunciation of one of the original languages is simplified. And then English started out as a hybrid.
In Miami in the late 1980s, I heard Cuban-Americans use a phrase that sounded like, “Flunkay la classay,” meaning to flunk the class.