NPR recently launched a new blog called Code Switch, dedicated to themes involving ethnicity, culture, and race, and how we go back and forth between different identities. The name “Code Switch” is rooted in the linguistic act of oscillating between two or more languages within a single conversation. NPR views code-switching in a more general sense, defining the term as the way we “subtly, reflexively change [and] express ourselves all the time.”
NPR’s Gene Demby describes the concept here in more depth:
So you’re at work one day and you’re talking to your colleagues in that professional, polite, kind of buttoned-up voice that people use when they’re doing professional work stuff.
Your mom or your friend or your partner calls on the phone and you answer. And without thinking, you start talking to them in an entirely different voice — still distinctly your voice, but a certain kind of your voice less suited for the office. You drop the g’s at the end of your verbs. Your previously undetectable accent — your easy Southern drawl or your sing-songy Caribbean lilt or your Spanish-inflected vowels or your New Yawker — is suddenly turned way, way up. You rush your mom or whomever off the phone in some less formal syntax (“Yo, I’ma holler at you later,”), hang up and get back to work.
Then you look up and you see your co-workers looking at you and wondering who the hell you’d morphed into for the last few minutes. That right there? That’s what it means to code-switch.
In what other situations have you experienced code-switching?
(via NPR)
