I grew up in the American South, with its distinctive slow-spoken accent known for dropped word endings and monosyllabic words often drawn out into multisyllabic ones. (“Is it fixin’ to raaaaaaain? Way-ull DAAAAY-UM.”)
I never knew there was a name for the phenomenon called Code Switching. Here’s One sentence from a New York Times article that started me thinking.
“Code-switching refers to ways that people — often people of color — alter their speech, dress or behavior around people of other races.” |
Having heard more than a few politicians visiting my native South and altering their speech patterns to ours in an attempt to fit in, I would suggest that the above definition is too narrow in its limits, and should include changing speech or behavior around people not just of other races but of other cultures.
Have you ever noticed anyone code switching? Have you ever done it yourself?
