Code Switching vs. Style Shifting–What’s in a Name?

[I wrote the following AFTER entering the blog below, because upon a night's sleep I realized I was growing less comfortable with the conceptual image of "switching."]

As I read more in the linguistic literature, I realize that it might be a good idea to alter how we reference the choice-making about language use. Most of the time, for most people, it’s not as though a switch is flipped and suddenly every single aspect of the Discouse – lexicon, phonology, syntax, gesture, tone, contour, etc – goes intact from one code to another. (See Lippi-Green: English with an Accent) It’s more accurate to imagine degrees of shifting—style shifting, is what I’m now going to call it, as sociolinguists do. Think of Oprah—she rarely speaks in AAE, syntactically. But she will often shift her tone, her tag questions, or in some other way signal her solidarity (and lay claim to the covert prestige that goes along with such solidarity) with an interviewee who is African American. Or even one who is not, in order to signal something like “I’m real, connected to the people out there in TV land, and you’re not.”) Politicians do this, too. Or you might have a person speaking “standard English” in every grammatical way, but pronounce ask “aks,” which is simply metathesis, an inversion of consonants, and something that has been going on in English forever—bird once having been bryd (there are many other examples). In a hundred years, everyone will likely be saying aks instead of ask, because it is a more natural way for a human mouth to manage those sounds. Another person might have his verbs “agree” in accordance with the practice of conjugating “irregularly,” which make it “standard English” (rather than regularizing the pattern–I is, you is, he is, we is, you is, they is–which renders the language stigmatized and “vernacular”) BUT say “ain’t NOTHING!” in order to make a point humorously with the emphatic use of a mulitple negative. My point is simply to consider the spoken languages represented very grossly by the terms “Standard English” and African American English on a fluid spectrum (shiftable) rather than as perching on/in two separate circuits. requiring a wholesale translation (switchable) from one to another. It may be easiest for young kids (and teachers) to think of “switching,” but on some level actual speakers know from experience that in reality, there’s all kinds of blurring and shifting and negotiating between the two.

-Inda