Listening to a podcast with some of my kids this week, I paused when their eyes went glassy and asked them, “Do you understand?” They made that vague sound of wanting to say yes but having to admit that, no. I do not understand.
The phrase in question was, “So my Mam went up to yer man”, spoken by Dylan MacCormack on The Moth Podcast. He is from Nenagh, the North Riding capital of my county, Tipperary. I come from the South Riding capital, Clonmel, Abú. And where I come from, the belly of Ireland, this is a problem-free phrase. Mam, short for Mammy, is the common form of address for Mom, Mum, Mother. And “yer man” is that guy. My mother went up to that guy. Aha! Their eyes lit up and we were off once more. When I told them that where I come from, that’s just the way people speak, I could feel the question that they were too polite to ask forming, popping. Why don’t you speak like that?
Good question.
Well, firstly, my Mam sent me to elocution lessons from the tender age of 7 to grind the flat a’s and dead d’s in the “dems and deese and dose” out of my accent. I repeated, “How, now, brown cow”, and, “Any, many, henny, penny”, until the diphthongs shrunk and my vowels became rounded. I read passages from Milton, from Yeats and from C.S. Lewis. At the same time, I started to sound different from my brothers, from my father. The kids in school had yet another reason to disdain me. I learned to flip between these two ways of speaking fluidly.
Code-switching is when a speaker learns to switch between two languages or language varieties. It was first coined in 1951 by Lucy Shepard Freeland in her book about the indigenous peoples of California, “Language of the Sierra Miwok”. The intermingling of linguistic influences led to a mix of phonetic, syntactical and dialectic elements that was considered substandard at the time. Freeland noted that the lack of ability to communicate in the language of the coloniser led to a shift to the mother tongue in order to express themselves adequately, and later to the formation of pigeon or creole forms of linguistic borrowing that form a third language. Code switching is when the speaker is fluent in both languages. As I came to be, in terms of dialects.
For as you may well know, the Irish vernacular is poetic, and lyrical, and bordering on the obscene, like angels balancing on the head of a pin. One prime example was the contribution by Irish writer Brendan Behan at an Oxford University debate regarding the difference between poetry and prose. He recited the following rhyme.
There was a young fella named Rollocks,
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks,
As he walked on the strand
With a girl by the hand,
The water came up to his ankles.
“That, declared Behan, is prose. But if the tide had been in, it would have been poetry.”
The reasons for code switching are hotly debated in the linguistic community, ranging from the needs of a specific topic, when genre-specific terminology is necessary, the need to fit in or express solidarity, to haggle, to clarify, to quote someone, say something in secret or quite simply, by unconsciously mirroring the person with whom you are speaking.
This is problematic if you are an accent sponge like I am.
Living in an international community, in a city twice as big as my little country, diverse vernaculars are kicked around like tin cans. In the English language alone, we have Irish, English, Scottish, Australian, Canadian, American, Indian, African; we’ve got fluent bilingual English speakers of Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish… The variety of lexicons and semantic fields, accents and colloquialisms is staggering, and I have not listed even half of the nationalities present here in Nanjing, I am sure.
It’s a starburst, a rainbow, a pantheon of dictions and slang and idioms. Each and every one of us code switches every day, perhaps even without knowing it, to enable communication, to build relationships and to perform transactional interactions that allow us to survive and thrive in a megacity that speaks a different language, operates on a different system of cultural norms and mores that we must learn, one way or another.
Many years ago, a friend of mine went to Australia to work for the summer. When her boss asked her to retrieve a certain document, she told him that certainly, she would go take a root in her desk. His eyes popping out of his head alerted her to the fact that somewhere, there had been a misstep in communication. To root for something in Ireland means “to search for”. It means something entirely different in Oz, something usually done in private, something you really don’t want to be chatting casually about with your boss.
Code-switching, at times a necessity, at times an adaptation of language or behaviour to maximise the comfort of others and receive more favourable treatment. I wish I could go back to the any-many-henny-penny years and bunk off class and keep my accent. But it’s quite possible that if I ever moved back there, I would reabsorb it naturally. I only have to walk past an accent to assimilate it. Perhaps the years of public speaking honed that ability, perhaps it’s just another tic in my curious neural suite. In any case, the ability to code switch and shift from “footpath” to “sidewalk”, from “tom-ei-to” to “tom-ah-to”, from “Darn-it” to “@#%* it” is a blessing and a curse.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) points to the social and psychological repercussions of code-switching, in which diminished authenticity can lead to hyper-vigilance or even burnout. They recommend promoting diversity and representation in the workplace to reduce the need for code-switching in the first place. As per their 2019 article, “The Costs of Code-Switching”, HBR states, “In addition to focusing on diversity, organisations need to create inclusive environments for employees to feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work”.
It may be too late for accent V1.0, but not to start bringing more of our authentic selves to the table, and encouraging others to do so too. Just like allyship, it’s not enough to passively promote inclusion. We need to fly those freak flags high and proud, embrace difference as delightful and celebrate the things that make us stand out from the crowd, rather than homogenise them.
Now there’s a cause to root for!
