Code-switching

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The phenomenon or practice of alternating between two or more languages or language varieties. uncountable

    "As with many bilingual families, it was normal to observe frequent code-switching at our dinner table."

Verb
  1. 1
    present participle and gerund of code-switch form-of, gerund, participle, present

Synonyms

All synonyms
code-mixing

Example

More examples

"A bilingual person can change from one language to another in the middle of a sentence, and this code-switching is a topic of study for linguists."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.