Code-Switching Quotes

Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.

Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

At home I can become lazy and if a Welsh word is really long, I just replace it with English.

People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.

Of course you cannot compare my Hindi with a Hindi-speaking person, but I am confident enough to hold a conversation in mixed Hindi-English.

It is an absolute privilege to be able to speak another language and have it be something you grew up with. I think it's a very important thing and I think that everywhere else in the world people speak more than one language.

My accent depends on whom I'm around.

I use Mandarin, Korean and English on a daily basis and usually only use Cantonese when I'm speaking with my relatives. I don't think it's very difficult for me to switch between each language because I've been doing it for so long.

I'm not good enough to flip in and out of my Brit accent to my American accent.

Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue.

I couldn't have known how vertiginous the entire Huxtable project was. I was, like, 10, 13, 15 years old when the show was a thing. But eventually, I could see that Cliff became a play for respectability. 'This is how you comport yourself among white people, young black child. Take a little bit of Howard with you on your way to Harvard.'

I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.

When I have to switch back and forth, it's not hard to go from the American accent to speaking Spanish, but then speaking Spanish and going back into the American accent is hard. I practice it so much. I talk to myself in the mirror all the time. It's like speaking multiple languages.

Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!

I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he used to speak in English. He wanted us to be quite fluent in English, especially when he was trying to correct our behavior; he would do that in English.

See, my strumpf is in my hair. Now, I don't know what strumpf means. It's just a term some brothas gave me.

Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.

Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.'

It's really natural for me to write bilingually.

It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open.

Latinos are learning English. That doesn't mean that they should sacrifice their original language or that they should give up this in-betweeness that is Spanglish.

I learned at an early age how to traverse the white world, the white-dominant world. I learned, and I was successful at it. I learned the nuances - I learned how to act, how to be - but I always was conscious and aware of my blackness.

In my house, we speak Spanglish to the dogs, to the grandchildren, to the kids.

It's only in acting where I've heard in auditions, 'Can you black it up a little bit? Can you make her a little bit more urban?' And it's just like, 'What?' I don't even know the word for that.

The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. You know, I speak like my mom; I speak like, you know, like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.