Code-switching: the reason my immigrant mother shamelessly shouted ‘does anyone have a rubber?’ in her American workplace

it's something every person does, and it's a skill to be proud of

I assume a lot of you have heard the term “code-switching,” but if you haven’t, it refers to a person switching back and forth between two languages or even just two (or more) ways of speaking. In social justice politics, code-switching often has a negative valence. For example, a child speaking what could be considered an African American dialect¹ code-switches to “standard” American English after being corrected by a teacher. The movement toward including Spanish-language translations of official documents or medical questionnaires could be interpreted as an accommodation so native Spanish speakers don’t have to attempt code-switching.²

We all code-switch, though.

If you work in a particular profession, undoubtedly that profession will have at least some terminology or phrases that are specific to it, or even specific to the individual culture of your workplace. We create shorthands in different circumstances which are certainly confusing or alienating toward people outside the circle of understanding. One might construe this as in-group/out-group behavior, but the existence of a code is not in itself insidious.

I keep blathering on about my Anatomy and Physiology class, but it applies here too: my professor told us at the beginning of the semester that learning A&P is like learning a new language—a major reason why it’s so challenging. There are new directional terms, four trillion new vocabulary words, new ways of phrasing descriptions. That’s why medical notes are virtually unintelligible to a layperson.

Or, for that matter, that’s why so many children are virtually unintelligible to people other than their parents. My kids are spaced apart by almost exactly five years (Ethan is about to turn 14, Oliver is 9, Harry is 4) mostly because pregnancy was hard on me and also babies are tiring and we wanted some years of sleep between newborns. Something I never really considered, though, was how I’d have to code-switch with my kids because of their ages, and how mentally taxing on parental energy that can be.

The amount of cultural information Noah has to teach our kids about the Lord of the Rings universe is truly staggering, and I feel bad for him.

Let’s take a little walk through a day of parental code-switching.

Harry

In the morning, Harry wants to go for a walk. We bundle up my goddaughter Lucy (who is 8 months), zip-up our coats, and head outside to Take the X.

Errrrm…wut?

We live at the top of a hillside cul-de-sac. Harry’s favorite route is across to the opposite cul-de-sac, then back to the cross street, then back and forth between the two stop signs at either end of the cross street. We’re walking in the shape of an X. He wants to Take the X.

While we’re walking, he articulates his fingers into different claw shapes, each one denoting a different dinosaur.³ I narrate the whole thing like a cross between David Attenborough and Calvin (see the mighty Mosasaurus swim through his ocean habitat! The pterodactyl flies high in the sky: a majestic beast! etc.) Lucy in her stroller plays the role of park ranger on an ATV, rounding up escaped dinos and corralling them in their habitats.

When we return to the lab (house) he has a snack while Watching Bus. Which is kids YouTube—he ask for “Bus” when he was little, meaning a wheels on the bus video. Now the whole phenomenon is simply “watching bus.”

Oliver

At 9 years old, Oliver is deep into tween pop culture. He watches a lot of fail videos, reaction videos, gaming videos, and weird facts videos on YouTube. Consequently, he frequently speaks like a 22-year-old bro from Florida who drives a “Lambo.”

Oliver: Who’s that?

Me: That’s a figure skater for the United States. Her name’s Karen Chen.

Oliver: Yeah but what’s she like at Starbucks?

Once when I told him I had trouble hearing him when we were speaking through masks, he replied, “That’s what Karens say.”

Plus, like many 9-year-olds who are still deep in the ELA text summary unit, Oliver’s stories frequently ramble and hit highlights that make perfect sense to him but little to anyone else. Add in his over/underbite combo as his permanent teeth make their way in, plus his status as an object in perpetual motion, and you have the perfect storm of weird acoustics and What Are You Even Saying.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention his lovely little singing voice. He’s nearly mastered “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” on pitch.

Ethan

As a 14-year-old mathematically minded D&D aficionado, communicating with Ethan requires me to speak multiple languages I can barely grasp. I am grateful for the statistics class I took a few semesters ago because Ethan frequently comes to me with questions about probabilities (for dice rolling outcomes, duh). In fact, on one statistics assignment, I got extra credit for being the only person to include a results graph—a graph that was Ethan’s idea (I told the professor my then-12-year-old kid was my lab partner and she was cool with it).

Lately, our best talks happen in the car on the way home from Thursday night swimming. (He’s been taking lessons with his best friend Ben a couple of evenings a week for several months now.) Last week I asked what he’d had for lunch, which led to an exposition of the different types of potato products available, and then a ranking.

Ethan: But whether it’s wedges, curly fries, or bog-standard French fries, the key is they have to be crisp.

Me: Oh, yeah. No question. The fry matters greatly.

Then later…

Me: What kind of cake did you want for your birthday?

Ethan: Just a bog-standard cheesecake with raspberries on top.

Me: So is bog-standard, like, your new phrase?

Ethan: You know I have an extensive vocabulary.

So yeah, the way I communicate with each of my kids is wildly different, and yeah, it can be exhausting to have to switch modes on a moment’s notice. But it’s not anyone’s fault. If anything, it’s a skill. Actually last week after swimming I was sitting in the sauna with a group of women who were speaking a Spanish-English hybrid, and I loved it. I didn’t understand everything they were saying—and that can be disconcerting, for sure—but I understood a good bit of it, and it warmed my heart. Cultures blend.

In social justice circles, the necessity for code-switching is often tinged with negativity: an imposition, an oppression. Looking at it a certain way, I can absolutely see that. But for a movement that so frequently cites capitalism as the root of all evil, it nearly as frequently unironically presents relationships in such a transactional light.

When oppressor/oppressed is the lens, any and every personal relationship is placed on a balance. If you’re on social media and follow any trending social justice stuff, you’ve probably seen the “emotional labor invoice” meme, which is kind of a gross way of looking at a relationship of any kind.

I once heard a DEI consultant say there could never be racial reconciliation because, using the metaphor of reconciling a cash drawer with receipts, the two sides were never equal to begin with.⁴

Code-switching is a skill. Some people are better at it than others; if anything, it’s a quality to be proud of. Yeah, it can be tiring. Just ask anyone immersed in a new language or a parent of young kids or a neurodivergent person who must work hard to notice social cues.

The negative valence given so many universal human experiences by theorists leaves me cold, if you haven’t been able to tell. Just because people experience things differently or in different ways doesn’t mean the experience itself can’t be the common ground where we meet. Choosing to go to that common ground is the keystone of any good relationship, the very foundation of mutual understanding.

I prefer to view code-switching as a good-faith envoy into places of difference, not a fraught DMZ between enemies.

1. Gullah-Geechee dialect is a regional example

2. Of course, it just makes sense (to me) that as the Spanish-speaking population grows, official channels should provide a bridge to American English through such efforts. But as with every gd thing, one side could say “you live here, you speak English” while the other side could say “forcing people to learn English is [insert negative adjective]” and both are a little big right and a little bit wrong.

3. one hooked claw is velociraptor; two hooked claws is T. rex BUT two claws and a chickeney neck movement is Dilophosaurus; three, Spinosaurus; all five fingers is indominus rex; a slightly backward flap is a Mosasaurus swimming while an upward flap is pterodactyl

4. I thought that was a weird way of looking at it; equal in what way? Perhaps there can’t be historical reconciliation of rights; we could certainly look at economic trends to illustrate the difference in balance sheets; but as humans, people of all races have always been equal, because race isn’t real and all humans are all worthy of dignity and respect. The belief that something is so doesn’t actually make it so. Racist perception made the “races” unequal, not any immutable characteristic. Perceptions can and do change; perception is not always law.