#code-switching

#code-switching

Most mornings in our house feel like a friendly little language carnival spinning through the kitchen. Before the kids even put on their shoes for school, they've already cycled through three languages joking in Hindi, arguing in Pashto and sprinkling English on top like chocolate chips tossed over their cereal. We don't plan it or rehearse it: it just happens. Pashto is the language of feelings and family business like complaints, alliances, who stole whose pencil, who touched the remote.

The White, benevolent liberal is the most racist person I've ever seen in the history of this country, and many of them don't even know it, Hunt said. The condescending tone in which they address us is utterly ridiculous. That cohort, Hunt said, don't view us as equal at all and by us, I mean Black people. They talk down to us, they think we are too stupid to get an ID to vote,

If you're raising children in Germany, you will have noticed that the language they use with their friends sounds like a completely different dialect. Teens are constantly inventing and popularising new slang, and in Germany this often means blending German with English in unexpected ways. Since 2008, Langenscheidt Publishing tries to keep up with the latest trends by organising an online vote each year exclusively for people between the ages of 11 and 20.

A few weeks ago, Jason came back from a reporting trip to Barbados and made a comment about how some Bajans thought he was from the Caribbean, because his accent changed when he was there. This was fascinating to me. The ensuing discussion made me realise that all of us had shifted our accents at various times, which got me thinking about all the unconscious ways in which we code switch, alternating between different identities.