Language Does More: Codeswitching
Code switching is something that everyone does, although many of us may not be aware of it. Picture how you speak to your friends, how you speak to your parents, and how you speak to your boss. Depending on the person you are speaking to, do you change the type of language you use? Do you use more casual speech when talking to your friends as opposed to talking to your boss? Most people would say yes to these questions. The way we talk with friends is more relaxed, whereas the way we speak in a professional setting needs to be clear and portray ourselves as being well rounded, knowledgeable, and confident. This phenomenon is called code-switching, wherein a person alters the way they speak depending on what they feel the expectations are of the person or people they are talking to.
A prime example of code switching is explained by Vershawn Ashanti Young in his piece, "Nah, We Straight": An Argument Against Code Switching. In his example, President Obama was heard saying in response to a waitress after she asked him if he needed change back on his $20: “Nah, we straight”.
During his time in the White House, it was completely unheard of for the United States to have a president who used a dialect other than Standard American English, or SAE. As can be heard in any recordings of his speeches or of Obama speaking in a professional setting, his use of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE is sparing.
His choice to use AAVE only in select settings, and not while addressing the general public was a conscious decision to code switch, in order to pander to what the mass majority of Americans expect a president to sound like.
But it is important to ask ourselves why we hold these assumptions about what we think a president, or anyone in a professional setting or position of power, should sound like. What makes one person more “professional” sounding than another? Why do we care about the way people talk?
While code-switching can be easy and go unnoticed for many people who switch smaller things like amount of swearing or slang used, there are many people, particularly those who use AAVE or Chicano English who put in great amounts of effort just to fit in with the expectation of Standard American English in a professional setting.
Black and Latin American people are already underrepresented in the business world, and the expectation from business owners for employees to code switch can both prevent a person who does not use SAE from being hired, and can also discourage people who do not use SAE from applying to a business in the first place, if they worry they will be judged or assume that they will not get the job.
Beyond linguistic bias, codeswitching carries with it some pretty extreme psychological costs, specifically related to cognitive load. High cognitive load refers to a situation where a person's working memory is overloaded with information, making it difficult for them to process or complete a task efficiently. Individuals who are codeswitching most or all of the time at work are managing a significantly higher cognitive load than those who only occasionally codeswitch. Why is this notable? Because: an employee who is codeswitching at work is much more likely to have lower overall job performance, with more errors and less learning. And, in turn, this then perpetuates stereotypes about job performance in underrepresented groups in the workplace.
Yikes.
Because of all this complexity, there has been a push in recent years for “freedom from code switching”. Linguistically, it is not justifiable to hold biases against different speech patterns and dialects, especially when these dialects of English can be fairly easily understood by all English speakers. Many people now argue that it is actually unethical to expect use of SAE across the board. Those who want to use it can and should, but there is no reason that it needs to be the only right way.
Everyone code switches, but not everyone codeswitches to equal degrees. There is a huge difference — both linguistically, culturally, and cognitively — between avoiding a swear word here and there and having to move between different grammatical systems. Because cognitive load plays such a large role in job performance, it’s important to consider what the true cost of codeswitching is. The freedom from codeswitching movement is a call both to individuals, who are unwilling to be their true selves in the workplace out of fear, as well as to organizations, who perpetuate that fear by upholding an invented standard of professionalism.
