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Among the many multilingual speakers of the world, code-switching (CSW) is a common linguistic phenomenon. Prior sociolinguistic work has shown that factors such as expressing group identity and solidarity, performing affective function, and reflecting shared experiences are related to CSW prevalence in multilingual speech. We build on prior studies by asking: is the expression of empathy a motivation for CSW in speech? To begin to answer this question, we examine several multilingual speech corpora representing diverse language families and apply recent modeling advances in the study of empathetic monolingual speech. We find a generally stronger positive relationship of spoken CSW with the lexical correlates of empathy than with acoustic-prosodic ones, which holds across three language pairs. Our work is a first step toward establishing a motivation for CSW that has thus far mainly been studied qualitatively.