One of our texts for this week is “What is Code Switching?” by Lisa Beasley. It’s probably not an unfamiliar concept to most of us. Beasley explains it for her viewer in about two minutes. It’s a concept at play in Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” among other texts we’ll read this semester.
In a comment below, share a link to another resource (video, blog post, dictionary definition, etc) about code switching (some say that the term, the concept itself, is racist–so if that’s interesting to you to find out, please pursue that avenue). Then write a short explanation of what the resource you found offers us in our pursuit to understand code switching and what it has to do with discourse communities.
PS–When I watched Beasley’s videos, the next several that auto-loaded were really good, too, so you might not have far to look!
PPS–but please don’t choose the same resource as someone else if you can help it!
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/08/176064688/how-code-switching-explains-the-world
Overall, this source discusses how people who spoke various languages would unintentionally adopt a different accent and how people frequently code-switch to talk more like others around them. I’ll use myself as an example. This source is quite similar to me because my accent changes depending on where I am and who I’m speaking to. For instance, I use a different tone when speaking Haitian Creole with my mother at home than I do with my friends and teachers at school.
Great point, Nana, that we might not even change language or word choice but our pronunciation might change when we shift from communicating with one group to the next.
We might all think about how we handle these shifts when we’re in mixed groups, and what they each represent about us. I’m also curious how we decide which to use in which group, how we assess a situation to determine our language, and how conscious we even are about it. For example, how we speak in ENG 1121 class–are we self-conscious about it? is it the same as for other classes? does it matter if we recognize other people in the class as sharing a language with us?
Looking forward to hearing others’ responses to the NPR article you shared and the examples it includes. I couldn’t watch the last video–were you able to? Anyway, it’s helpful having these different videos as examples.
This is an extremely interesting TED talk about what code switching means and its realities to a person trying to fit in with the rest of what is around them. Code switching in one sense effectively means conforming to the standards that the majority around you set for everyone else simply because they outnumber the people who are different than them. This is especially true for people trying to fit in with the rest of the crowd in places like schools and work environments where huge stigma comes from being or acting different than your peers. Inevitably, that person who is different isn’t allowed to be themselves around these people and it cuts off that source of identity and they have to put up a façade in order to feel accepted around this new group or risk being cutoff and alone. Code switching is a survival strategy, and not one that should be the norm.
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/what-is-translanguaging
When I typed “code switching”, one of the auto-results caught my eye – “Code switching vs. Translanguaging”. I had no idea what Translanguaging was. Babbel.com claims, “Code-switching looks at language from the outside, but translanguaging is about looking at individuals.” I understood this as code-switching being when you switch your language or dialect to best communicate with a person or place of a specific race/ethnicity or atmosphere, respectively. Whereas, translanguaging, is to translate your thoughts for each person or place based on your experience with them rather than with their race or any prejudged vibe (I was wrong, keep reading). If this is true, I can definitely understand why many think code-switching is racist. Unlike speaking Spanish in a Spanish community, speaking in AAVE is not welcomed by non-black people. AAVE is not something you learn on Duolingo – it’s a lived experience and is sacred to the black community; An experience created out of exclusion which continues to be excluded from white spaces. So, code-switching is inherently racist because it implies that AAVE is less valid than standard English despite it having nuance upon nuance much the same.
To come back to translanguaging, it’s defined as “teaching people to become bilingual or multilingual through the use of two or more languages” or “using multiple languages together.” However, many are spilt on its definition, especially in a real-world context. Babbel explains how many interpret it as not seeing multiple languages as different but as creating a new, broader experience with them. Ofelia GarcĂa, an advocate for translanguaging says, “Translanguaging is more than going across languages; it is going beyond named languages and taking the internal view of the speaker’s language use.” A perfect example of this is Spanglish. Spanglish seems just as nuanced as AAVE because there are many variations of one word depending on how it’s said, the gender it’s said to, and many more reasons. I can’t attest to how one is treated when speaking Spanglish but I can imagine it’s much like when someone speaks in AAVE or when Amy Tan’s mother speaks “broken English”. Perhaps there’s a stigma that says Spanglish speakers are less educated because they can’t speak standardized English to a t. Upon a quick google search, Spanglish is controversial within the Latino community “because it seems to be a measure of the degree of assimilation Latinos are or aren’t undergoing in the United States.” So perhaps some Latinos who speak Spanglish code-switch to avoid criticism from their family who may say they are abandoning their roots?…