I originally encountered the term "codeswitching" as a term to describe how a bilingual person might inadvertently, without noticing, switch from language A to B within a sentence or paragraph, and perhaps at some subsequent point switch back again. The trigger might be a borrowed word or phrase from the other language, or a name from the other culture, such as George Washington or Benito Juárez. Bilingual families and communities develop their own style of codeswitching. For example, Tex Mex has fairly well established patterns of codewitching that give this hybrid dialect a distinctive sound, different from the Puerto Rican style of accommodating language fluidity.
There are specialists who study that. I will leave the details of that study to those specialists. Today, I just want to ask my colleagues here how to translate "codeswitching" to Spanish, in other words, how to speak in Spanish about the phenomenon of codeswitching without having to use a loan word from English. And first I want to make sure everyone understands what the word means. Let's take a conversation in Spanish. Let's say Person A is fully bilingual. We've all experienced this (although some individuals are more prone to codeswitching than others): Say I'm yakking with someone in Spanish. I happen to mention an English word or name, and my train veers off the Spanish track over to the English track, where I stay until either:
(a) I realize what happened, and awkwardly lift my train up off the English track and carry it back over to the Spanish track; or
(b) I spend extensive time rolling along that English track with no embarrassment or regret until experiencing another sudden !!Codeswitch!! and I'm back on the Spanish track, where I might or might not realize I've switched trains again....
Nowadays, the term goes beyond languages and now extends to dialects, cultural attitudes and beliefs, body language, and political attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.
I'll be happy if you can help me find ways of talking about the simple version -- the linguistic type of codeswitching, in bilingualism.
Edit to add:
For the bilingual person, a codeswitch can be embarrassing, if the bilingual person is talking to a monolingual person. Especially if the bilingual person was assuming the other person had a level of knowledge of the other language that he turns out not to have. (This is not to say that I personally think that anyone who experiences this should feel embarrassed or ashamed. I'm just describing what I've experienced and observed.)