In 1937, under the leadership of dictator Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic carried out a mass killing of Haitians living in the country’s northwestern frontier. Though estimates of lives lost vary, some scholars say that as many as 30,000 or more Haitian men, women and children were massacred.
As the story goes, Dominican soldiers carried with them sprigs of parsley, differentiating between Dominicans and Haitians by the way they pronounced the Spanish word for the herb, perejil. Should they fail to produce what was deemed a “proper” Spanish pronunciation, they were murdered.
Language is powerful. It’s personal. It’s the first and most important gift we receive from our parents, and we carry it with us for the rest of our lives. As we grow older, we add new words to our vocabulary. Our ever-expanding bank of slang reflects the environment and circumstances in which we live and our accents serve as hyper-specific markers of the places we were raised, for better or for worse.
Beyond the semantic meaning of any given phrase, human language carries social weight. Haitians in the Dominican Republic lost their lives because their speech did not conform to Dominican standards. While the ‘perejil test’ is an admittedly extreme and quite violent example, we make smaller versions of these judgments every day. According to one study, children can begin developing opinions about accents by the age of nine. When comparing northern and southern American accents, children across the United States deemed northerners more “in charge” and smarter than their southern counterparts, while conceding that the latter sounded “nicer.”
These linguistic stereotypes have given rise to another distinctly human and genuinely fascinating phenomenon: code-switching. Kamala Harris does it. Jennifer Lopez infamously tried in 2011, crediting her success at the American Music Awards to her “gente latino.” And I’d bet my bottom dollar that you do it, too.
My voice, both sonically and figuratively, is a patchwork of all that I have experienced. I was born in rural Alabama, where I spent the first decade or so of my life. From there, I picked up the habit of using double modals like “might should” or “used to could.” Then, I moved to the Virgin Islands. It was on St. Thomas that I traded in “y’all” for “ayu” and learned that “good night” could be a greeting.
In class though, it’s a different story. While I may “reckon I hatt’n thought about that yet” on the phone with my Alabamian kin, I’m far more likely to “suppose I haven’t yet considered it” as I share my point of view in an anthropology lecture. Both phrases convey an identical semantic meaning, but their social function is different, whether we choose to acknowledge it. Just as we write academic papers in a “formal register,” we are constantly adjusting our patterns of speech to conform to what we believe is expected of us.
While it is easy to take a cynical view of linguistic conformity and code-switching, I am of the opinion that it’s really quite cool. When I adjust my speech patterns in my anthropology class, I don’t do it because I am ashamed of my southern drawl or “unconventional” vocabulary; I do it because I’ve learned how to maximize the social function of my speech. I am signaling to my classmates and my professor that I am a part of the in-group — that the points I am making are credible, and that I am willing to engage in discourse. Conversely, I don’t revert to my Southern roots on the phone because I’m trying to “dumb down” my speech for an Alabamian audience. It’s a subconscious signal to my relatives that I, quite literally, speak their language. I am able to understand their thoughts, feelings, hopes and desires on a deeper level than someone who does not, and I think that’s a superpower.
I am fluent in English. If you’re reading this column, you likely are too. But it isn’t just English that you and I have in our linguistic toolkit. It’s customer service English and academic discourse English. It’s small-talk English and maybe even chronically online English. The dialects we learn to speak and the “codes” we assume are directly related to the communities we choose to associate with. When we code-switch from one dialect to another, we put our conversation partners at ease by foregrounding our shared experiences and understandings. So, the next time you find yourself switching on that customer service voice at work — wait, just one second — and ponder for a while. What a wonderfully interconnected bunch of linguistic chameleons we all are.
