Why do multi-lingual people seemingly, with no reason, switch between languages while talking to someone who is also multi-lingual? What benefit does it have over staying with the language they started the conversation with?
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Not everything translates exactly from one language into another.
When you can only speak one language, you get around not having a word for a specific thing, or not being able to describe something perfectly, because you have the rest of the language available to you as well as slang, and hand gestures etc.
However, if you speak two or more languages, it is usually easier to switch into another language because that language has a particular set of vocabulary that is more appropriate for the topic.
Then on top of that, there’s secrecy.
Being able to switch languages to say something that you don’t want everyone to understand is a very useful tool
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