by Camila Martinica Camila Martinica is a senior in Global Studies at The University of Illinois. Camila’s future plans include applying to graduate school. She wrote this blog post in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in spring 2019. Have you ever been walking down by a beach and noticed the different ways that people communicate with each other? How one group of people can be talking in “American” English while the others speak in “British” English? Or have you noticed how you pick up bits and pieces of a language that you thought you knew, for example Spanish, but in reality what you start hearing is a mixture of two languages and people are just switching from one language, or “code,” to another within the same sentence? This is a phenomenon known as code-switching and I think it makes you feel like you’re in a different world, right? So, now let me ask you to imagine this: You’re in North Africa, walking on the Southern coast of the Mediterranean. You’re at the beach and ove...