Traditionally linguists have bemoaned the fact that the general public knows little of what we do because the subject isn’t taught in schools. But that has changed over the past 20 years or so, as the internet and especially social media have been so effective at getting the word out. I have rejoiced to see the public becoming ever more hip to the fact that language always changes, that you aren’t handicapping your child by raising them to be bilingual, that the way I just used “them” does not spell the fall of our Republic.
Twenty years ago I never thought I would hear the term “code-switching” used as widely as it now is beyond the halls of academe. Code-switching is perhaps best known in reference to alternating between different languages, such as English and Spanish. However, the same concept applies to different dialects of the same language, such as between a standard dialect and a colloquial one. But as glad as I am to see this, my heart sinks at the way people are mocking Vice President Kamala Harris for code-switching according to the audience she is speaking to. Barack Obama attracted criticism for doing the same thing back in the aughts; I hoped we had gotten past this.
Harris does this readily. In an address in Atlanta responding to “Lock him up” calls about Donald Trump, she said, “The courts are gonna handle that,” later working up the crowd by referring in pep-talk style to “Novem-buh.” In a speech in Michigan she mentioned that “We have fun doin’ hard work.” Some of her switching is simply to good old colloquial American — gonna, doin’ — but at other times, especially for heavily Black audiences like the one in Atlanta, she switches into Black English: “Novem-buh”; “foah” for “four.”
A lot of people think there is something wrong with her doing this. “Harris seems to put on an accent for Atlanta rally,” read one chyron on Fox News. One take on X, typical in its tone on the issue, displays familiarity with the term “code-switching” but frames it as a cynical act: “Code switching is a convenient way to describe blatant pandering.” Of course Trump has joined in asking “Did you hear a new accent?” with his running mate, JD Vance, right behind him claiming that Harris is using a “fake Southern accent.”
First of all, Harris is not doing a “Southern” accent. She is not summoning Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian Fortune Feimster or Rue McClanahan’s Blanche Devereaux. What people are hearing as Southern is Black English with which white Southern English overlaps only partially. Black English has a great many traits alien to white Southern.
More to the point, language is about reaching into another mind. It’s about connecting. Code-switching is one of the ways that humans use language to connect. Using the colloquial dialect of a language serves the same function as drinking or getting a mani-pedi together. It says, “We’re all the same.” It is especially natural, and common, when seeking connection about folksier things or summoning a note of cutting through the nonsense and getting to the heart of things in a “Let’s face it” way. This is why many of us readily say “Ain’t gonna happen” even if we aren’t given to saying “ain’t” regularly.