UC Irvine: Academic subject

I grew up in a house with three languages and no agreement on any of them. My grandmother spoke Tagalog, my father answered in English, and somewhere in the middle a private dialect formed that only the five of us understood. ¹For years I thought this was just my family being chaotic. Then a borrowed library book told me it had a name: code-switching, and that linguists study exactly this.Inside the classroom, I went looking for the subject wherever I could find pieces of it. ²My school had no linguistics course, so I built one out of the parts I could reach. In English, I wrote my research paper on how Tagalog speakers borrow English verbs but keep Tagalog tense markers. In Spanish class, I started noticing the same borrowing rules and asked my teacher why, which she admitted she had never thought about.Outside class, I got obsessive. ³I recorded my grandmother telling the same story twice, once to me and once to her sister, and transcribed both to see what changed. With her sister she dropped English entirely and her sentences got longer. I started a small notebook tracking which words my family borrowed and which we never did, and found we borrow nouns freely but almost never borrow the word for love.I also took a free online course on phonetics and spent a weekend learning to write the International Phonetic Alphabet, which let me finally spell the sounds my family makes that English has no letters for. ⁴What started as my family being chaotic turned out to be a system with rules I could write down. I want to study linguistics because every household has a grammar nobody wrote, and I want to spend my life reading them.