Code-Switching
How languages can be a sort of passport
A few years ago, I watched this video of now-disgraced Chinese celebrity Kris Wu, and it has lived rent-free in my head ever since. Why does he talk like that? His accent is a bizarre mélange of near-perfect English and African American Vernacular English, the lilting tones of Chinese complemented by the lack of enunciation, accentuated by a Southern drawl. His first language is Chinese, so it’s apparent where that accent comes from. The AAVE, on the other hand, comes out of nowhere. Kris Wu spent his teenage years in Vancouver, and they certainly don’t speak like that there.
It’s obvious that he trained himself to speak that way, because everyone who was anyone in the ‘rap game’ spoke like that. He’s trying to ‘keep it real’, ‘vibe out to that music’, and meet ‘cool cats’. Sure, he’ll claim he speaks like that because he listens to a lot of hip-hop, and it’s now a part of his culture, but the accent is certainly learned. Kris Wu’s accent can be compared to that of Rich Brian’s, which sounds like this. Rich Brian grew up speaking Indonesian and similarly claims to have learned his English from watching rap on YouTube. But while his music certainly contains AAVE, he doesn’t sound like that when speaking normally.
This is contentious because AAVE, or the ‘black accent’ is often perceived to be less prestigious than most other American English accents. This materializes in negative outcomes for its speakers, whether it be in employment opportunities or law enforcement encounters. This conversation quickly cascades into one about cultural appropriation: AAVE is co-opted by non-Black people for profit, but is detrimental when Black people use it themselves.
However, what I wanted to discuss today is not this, but the act of intra-lingual code-switching itself. I have no doubt that off-camera, Kris Wu speaks English as he learned it, as a Vancouverite teenager. In common usage, an accent is used to refer to a departure from the norm, generally a mark of foreignness. From a linguistics perspective, however, everyone has an accent, even if you’re a coastal liberal elite. The best example of this once again, is the code-switching that Black Americans have to do: because of the negative connotations of AAVE, they are skilled at changing up how they speak depending on the situation: here’s Obama doing it, and here’s Clinton doing it.
Growing up, I didn’t speak English at home, and my mother was insistent that I speak English properly, and without an ‘accent’. I turned out okay, and I think she certainly deserves some credit in that regard. However, we have very different approaches to language. In her words, language should be a ‘little black dress’ or a ‘passport’, versatile and fit for all situations, as well as a sort of identification. As someone who grew up in China, where there was only an official form of Chinese, it’s easy to see why it was the case. In a time when the Chinese government was trying to a country divided by multiple cultures and dialects, Mandarin was held in high esteem. Eventually, all major TV and radio announcements would be made in very proper Mandarin, as would all classroom education.
As a model student throughout my primary and secondary education, I never had to code-switch. For the most part, I spoke to my peers as I spoke to my teachers, as I spoke to customer service workers. All my peers and I spoke the same way, as we were all second-generation immigrants. There were phrases and words that I would certainly avoid when interacting with authority figures, but my accent would stay the same. This changed when I started at college and became exposed to the varieties of English spoken by peers, as well as the register that they would adopt when speaking to professors and corporate recruiters.
There was the universal Toronto slang that Drake liked to reference containing the nods to the islander and Commonwealth populations, as well as the suburban Toronto slang with more of a North African/Arab tinge. There was also the plethora of hockey slang that was thrown in my face. However, the most interesting thing, the thing that I was missing, was the ability to switch between their relaxed state that signaled insouciance with their peers, and a formal register that signaled competency with the professionals.
The majority of my Asian American friends and I fell somewhere in the middle, not quite uptight enough to arouse derision at a party, yet not quite informal enough to trigger the ire of professors during a presentation. At the same time, it took me a long time to develop the ability to code-switch between casual and formal so that I could accrue social capital amongst my peers and real capital with recruiters.
My mother’s ‘little black dress’ theory esteems only the highest register: if I spoke ‘properly’ the whole time, I would never have to worry about seeming too plebeian. But that accent isn’t always the most appropriate for a social setting; after all, language is about effective communication, and speaking in an accent appropriate for its audience is just that. It builds instant rapport and avoids misunderstandings. Considering that degradation of speech necessitates a hierarchy of accents. What a nice coincidence that ‘proper English’ happens to be the one that the ruling class speaks, so they’ll never have to switch between languages. Unless of course, you’re a politician.
So, back to Kris Wu. For him to have learned how to code-switch effectively in a foreign language demonstrates his commitment to his craft. As a product of the Korean entertainment complex, he is a well-trained actor and speaks more than a handful of mutually unintelligible languages, but his English code-switching shows his skill at English. Despite my claims of fluency in Chinese and French, I cannot code-switch in either.
A common criticism of my Chinese is that I sound like an elementary school student; my limited vocabulary contributes to a certain degree, but an equally important part of it is because I only speak in Chinese with people in my parents' generation and older. I have little idea how to speak to peers, much less to my juniors. In French, there is a decidedly formal register that affects pronoun choice. I will unerringly use formal pronouns rather than run the risk of offending someone. This is to say nothing of casual French or slang.
Consider that an indictment of the importance of code-switching and accent variability. It is not only an indication of language fluency, but usage. If someone only can only speak in one register in a language, they have only ever had to use that one register. They are either young children, born into the socioeconomic elite, or language learners, none of which are anything to brag about.
