To better understand multilinguslism in a practical context, I determined to conduct an experiment to record how often I would code-switch in a twenty four hour period.  Codeswitching is a bilingual/multilingual practice that is used not only as a conversational tool, but also as a way to establish, mantain and delineate ethnic boundaries and identities (Lowi).  Often, individuals could technically communicate through a certain standerized way, but by selecting the right ‘language’, they are able to connect within a group and even preserve their ethnic identities in the process.  Lysicott explains that her community still uses slang from the street to preserve the language of her people rather than assimilating.

To discover how often I would codeswitch and to what languages/dialects I was switching between, I mark the timing of each conversation using my phone as well as a log notebook following the conversation to record the details/word choices.  For each codeswitch, I would categorize it under one of the following categories: academic, family, friends, and public.  Each genre was also placed in either tier 1 (casual) vs tier 2 (formal).  After two days of the experiment, I have retrieved the following data: 7 instances of family language, 8 of friends, 5 of academic, and 4 of public.  To best represent this data, I created a pie chart that shows the percentage of total instances to each language.  Note that I decided to choose this instead of total time because I wanted to highlight even brief moments of codeswitching.  

Of these genres, I also speak 9 times in a casual style and 11 times in a formal method.  I felt it important to also reveal this distinction because although I may be with a friend, I could choose a more professional or casual tone based on our relationship.

Based on these results, my most used language was Formal Friends which is clearly evident by the great amount of friends I have are from college, and thus our language choices are a product of that.  On the other hand, my least used language was Informal Public.  When I am out with strangers, I always choose more formal speech because I do not want to stereotype based on their appearance.  If a future experiment were to be conducted, it should be done over a longer period of time to truly reflect the behavioral and literacy choices of the subject rather than simply two days.  As Lowi has stated, How codes witching serves to function as a way of identifying and to align oneself with a group is another issue that researchers have examined.  My experiment in part reflected this question through the constant language changes to “fit in” with the particular group.  In just 2 days, I code switched over 21 times with different people to almost disguise myself as perfectly in their group.  The only ironic part of this argument is that the other party is code switching as well, and so we could be both speaking a different language based on expectations of the discourse.