Code-switching, Dreaming, and the Psychology of a Conlang

[Tra'nau]

Throughout Karen Traviss’ work, we see Mandalorians mixing Mando’a words with their speech in Basic. From my memory, the tendency was to insert Mando’a when a character would swear (my favorite instance of this would have to be when Kal Skirata says “when the osik hits the fan” or something to that effect) or describe an untranslatable concept like shereshoy or aay’han. While a useful writing device, this textual occurrence is a window into a real-life phenomenon- code-switching, the act of mixing languages. I wanted to see if anyone did any sort of code-switching relating to Mando’a- I think I’ve seen some stories around the site about jumbling up languages and was curious if there were any more stories that anyone would want to share.
Personally, though I don’t ever seem to mix anything with English (my native language), I tend to do something that a few friends and I have coined “Spando’a”. I’m taking a Spanish class that occasionally requires that I complete a speaking exercise. The whole Spando’a thing started when I was doing one of those- I had written down a sentence in Spanish to record myself speaking aloud. I read it off and finished the recording. When I went back to listen to it, though, I had said the whole thing in Mando’a! Psychologically, that might have meant that, at that time, I was roughly equally proficient in either language, but I couldn’t find any specifics online, especially relating to conlangs.
Another somewhat related thing that has happened to me once or twice is having a dream in Mando’a. To anyone proficient enough- has this ever happened to you?
The first time it happened, I woke up remembering being able to understand English somewhat, but only being able to speak Mando’a. I seemed to remember shouting things like “Nu’ni suvari!” and “Ke’hibira Mando’a!” at several extremely confused listeners. The second time it happened, I think I must have been dreaming about going to a Mercs convention or something (the previous day I had been reading about entry requirements- I’m not a member but have always been interested). I remember being in some sort of large event facility and seeing a bunch of people in beskar’gam. I ran up to one and said something like “Cool armor, vod!” and proceeded to crash the meeting that the group was headed to. (...it was a weird dream, okay?!)
If you got this far down the post, thanks for listening to me rant about the psychology of Mando’a! If you have any thoughts or related stories, I’d love to hear them!

[Vlet Hansen]

I actually code switch fairly often, my wife's first language is Russian, which I only know a smattering of, though she's perfectly fluent in English as well, and we'll frequently use a mix of all 3 languages for various things around the house. "хочешь shig?" is a very common phrase to hear from me