Code Switching
Anthony Hughes
ENG 111: Leigh Gardner Assignment #1, Final Copy 22 Sept 2011
Code Switching: A Daily Habit
Code switching is a part of everyone’s daily life. Gloria Anzaldua expressed how she used code switching in her story “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Anzaldua grew up in Texas, near the Mexico border, to a Mexican-American family. Her family primarily spoke Spanish, but while at school and in the community, they had to speak English, the accepted language of America (Anzaldua 530). Anzaldua did not want her native language to die, so she wrote “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” to express her feelings, and to show how code switching affected her everyday life. In the story, Anzaldua expressed that depending on who she was talking to, she would have to use a different type of Spanish depending on where the person was from, or English if she was speaking with a white American. According to Anzaldua there were about seven different dialects of Spanish that she knew how to speak (530-532). She also wrote about her culture, and how they enjoyed different types of movies and music than what would be considered “popular” for the white community (534-535). Once Anzaldua went to college, she was given a speech class were the point of the class was to get rid of her accent (Anzaldua 528). This is when she realized that her language is at risk of dying, and she believed it should last as long as there were Mexican-Americans in the United States; everyone has their freedom of speech and they can use any language they wanted too. No matter if it is Anzaldua switching between two different languages or myself acting different around different groups of people; everyone code switches whether it is subtle, or obvious.
Many teens talk to their parents differently than how they would talk to their siblings. Primarily, young children are taught to respect their elders, and most keep this principle with them throughout their lives. Having acquired this way to act, teens talk to
ENG 111: Leigh Gardner Assignment #1, Final Copy 22 Sept 2011
Code Switching: A Daily Habit
Code switching is a part of everyone’s daily life. Gloria Anzaldua expressed how she used code switching in her story “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Anzaldua grew up in Texas, near the Mexico border, to a Mexican-American family. Her family primarily spoke Spanish, but while at school and in the community, they had to speak English, the accepted language of America (Anzaldua 530). Anzaldua did not want her native language to die, so she wrote “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” to express her feelings, and to show how code switching affected her everyday life. In the story, Anzaldua expressed that depending on who she was talking to, she would have to use a different type of Spanish depending on where the person was from, or English if she was speaking with a white American. According to Anzaldua there were about seven different dialects of Spanish that she knew how to speak (530-532). She also wrote about her culture, and how they enjoyed different types of movies and music than what would be considered “popular” for the white community (534-535). Once Anzaldua went to college, she was given a speech class were the point of the class was to get rid of her accent (Anzaldua 528). This is when she realized that her language is at risk of dying, and she believed it should last as long as there were Mexican-Americans in the United States; everyone has their freedom of speech and they can use any language they wanted too. No matter if it is Anzaldua switching between two different languages or myself acting different around different groups of people; everyone code switches whether it is subtle, or obvious.
Many teens talk to their parents differently than how they would talk to their siblings. Primarily, young children are taught to respect their elders, and most keep this principle with them throughout their lives. Having acquired this way to act, teens talk to
Cited: Anzaldua, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Reading the World: Ideas that Matter. Ed. Michael Austin. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010. 527-537. Print.