Code-Switching — On Having Two Linguistic Personalities
The idea that there are better ways to speak and classier dialects of language is socially constructed
Code-switching is “the action of shifting between two or more languages, or between dialects or registers of a language, within a discourse, especially in response to a change in social context.”
Growing up, my family always accused me of “talking white.” Spoiler alert, I am not white. I did, however, attend a somewhat prestigious secondary school. There’s a pervasive trend in my country of mocking the accent of students from said school. We were posh, “hoity-toity” (their words, not mine), and we spoke with an accent that gave off an air of superiority.
I’m from Trinidad and Tobago where the official language is English. However, it’s more common to hear a homegrown English creole that is distinct from its language of origin. I am fluent in this language, and it’s how I speak with my family.
I first started code-switching (although I wouldn’t learn that term until much later) when I was eleven years old and got accepted to the secondary school of my dreams. The people who attended this school were upper-middle-class students, and I couldn’t be more different coming from a low-income family.
