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Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes:
Many first and second generation children of immigrant communities are acutely aware of their bilingual status. Code-switching - mixing words, phrases or even whole sentences within the same conversation is typical of speakers in such communities. In most cases this process is subconscious and, as Nishi explains, indicates that a speaker feels a particular word expresses far more accurately the meaning they are trying to convey or is merely indicative of the fact that a speaker doesn't know the appropriate word in one of the languages. The occasional or even frequent use of a Punjabi word or expression within an English sentence can communicate a great sense of identity.
This phenomenon has given rise to a number of names for specific mixed varieties of English - Wenglish is spoken by many bilingual speakers in Wales, Spanglish refers to the speech of the large numbers of people in the USA from a Hispanic background and Penglish describes quite succinctly the language behaviour of Punjabi-speaking British Asians.
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