Code-switching refers to the practice of alternating between two or more languages often within a single spoken sentence.

Normally, code-switching is practised by polyglots, who are fluent in several languages, and where transition between different languages is entirely natural.  When it comes to foreign languages, I perform my own version of code-switching born out of possessing an equal degree of ineptitude in all languages, resulting in me mentally grasping for the first foreign phrase that might enter my head, regardless of whether it matches the country I am visiting, and then mixing it up in a pick-and-mix melange of misunderstanding.  So, I might often be found enquiring:

“Je voudrais ein großes cerveza, per favore.”

Who knew that I was such an accomplished code-switcher?  In the past, I would just have been called an ignorant monoglot.  Or English.

While my code-switching with foreign languages might be entirely involuntary and a general hazard to communication, an area where I am a much more accomplished code-switcher is across social class.  A grammar school education and white-collar career have resulted in giving me a middle-class accent.  Home counties.  Practically untraceable.  However, not far beneath the surface, resides the residue of an entirely different accent and set of vocabulary.  Working class.  North London.  Not far removed from Estuary English.  Multicultural London English (MLE).  Urban British English.  This throwback most typically asserts itself whenever I deal with a workman about the house.  I will then use a conversational form of language that effortlessly code-switches between social classes:

“We seem to be having a slight issue with the toilet, you know what I mean, innit.”

Suddenly, I find myself uttering terms of over-familiarisation, which would otherwise never find expression in the course of my normal daily speech: “Mate”; “Guv”; “Chief”.

I become a working class Zelig; an unrecognisable hybrid of different eras of myself.

Why this need for social class code-switching?  I have attempted to analyse my own psychology.  A need for acceptance?  Unlikely, given my typical unsociability.  A desire to put the workman at his ease?  A possibility, although my linguistic subterfuge is so transparent that it probably has the reverse effect.  Maybe it is nothing more than a return to a form of speech with which I feel more comfortable.

Which begs the question:

Am I acting the rest of the time?

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree connects with his roots, innit.