Comparing code switching and lexical borrowing

In my last post, I wrote about code switching, particularly the fact that code-switched Yoruba-English leads to significant information loss during translation. In trying to find a topic for my next post, the first thought was to explore theories surrounding the “information loss during translation”.

“Could this loss be because Yoruba is a heavily diacritical language and many modern Yoruba speakers/writers are not big on diacritics?” or “Is less information lost if there’s a significantly greater proportion of one language over the other in code-switched expressions?”. I wish this post provided elaborate answers to those questions, but it doesn’t because I don’t have the answers yet. Instead, I’m keeping it simple and writing about a newly encountered concept of lexical borrowing and how it compares to code switching.

Lexical borrowing is a concept that’s similar to code switching in some ways and different in others. It is the process of adopting one or more words from one language’s vocabulary into another’s. To put things in perspective, lexical borrowing is how words like “tea” with a Chinese origin and “cybercafe” with a French origin have found their way into everyday Yoruba expressions.

Lexical borrowing happens at the individual word level and is primarily caused by the inability to translate a word into a given language, forcing the speaker to borrow the language as-is from its originating language.

For example, when a Yoruba speaker says “Jide wa ni kindergarten” (read ‘Jide is in kindergarten’ in English), what they do in essence is to borrow the word Kindergarten from the German vocabulary because there’s practically no word in the Yoruba vocabulary that describes the first year of formal education.

On the other hand, code switching happens at the sentence level and is caused by different reasons including; the need to fit in, assert persuasion, communicate in secret, and express a different kind of emotion. For example, a Yoruba speaker might use a code-switched Yoruba-English sentence “I’m not joking with you, je ki ori e pe” in place of “I’m not joking with you, warn yourself” because to a Yoruba audience, the former is liable to carry more weight and convey more seriousness than the latter.

Lastly, it is important to note that in lexical borrowing, there are wealth dynamics between the languages involved. More words come from one language than the other, with the former usually being a wealthier language in terms of constructs, words, experiences, and expressions. This is very evident in the form of lexical borrowing that happens between the Yoruba and English languages.

Best believe I’ll come back to the theories and questions I spoke about earlier, but I do not know when :)