Don't Tread on Me (By Saying Strange Things)

Yet again, we see the issue of code-switching come to the forefront in Lisa Delpit's "No Kinda Sense." It is accompanied by undertones of the phenomenon previously referred to as playing the game, or speaking a certain way not out of any sense of loyalty, but out of the need to achieve a desired result in a social setting. We (as a class and as considerers of linguistics) have determined that we all code-switch on a regular basis. Given this fact, why on Earth is it so difficult to cross these dialectical barriers in the United States? There is no problem of understanding, as there is with a full-on language barrier. Standard English speakers have no problem (perhaps with the exception of certain obscure idioms) understanding AAVE speakers, who have no problem understanding Appalachian English speakers, who have no problem understanding English speakers from the Bronx. The issue cannot possibly be one of language comprehension.

Perhaps, then, it is something more latent. Language is an integral part of each of us; we identify with the words that we speak in a similar way to the choices that we make and the clothes that we wear. Our language is a picture of ourselves that we choose to show to the world. As such, it feels immediately alienating to encounter someone else who is fundamentally different in such a manner. If someone sees a person wearing totally different clothes from him/herself, he/she is less likely to approach the stranger and will likely not be as friendly (at least in thought) as he/she would be to someone who looked similar. An analogous case can be made for the way each of us speaks. It takes a truly thoughtful, open-minded person to move past this initial schema-based thinking.

So then, if the problem can be identified as one of self-identification and alienation, then question becomes: How can we change it? How can we, as a society, be made comfortable with people that we perceive to be so fundamentally different from ourselves? Or should we simply foster the belief that, despite the language differences, we are not that fundamentally different after all?