[…]
Harris does this readily. In an address in Atlanta responding to “Lock him up” calls about Donald Trump, she said, “The courts are gonna handle that,” later working up the crowd by referring in pep-talk style to “Novem-buh.” In a speech in Michigan she mentioned that “We have fun doin’ hard work.” Some of her switching is simply to good old colloquial American — gonna, doin’ — but at other times, especially for heavily Black audiences like the one in Atlanta, she switches into Black English: “Novem-buh”; “foah” for “four.”
A lot of people think there is something wrong with her doing this. “Harris seems to put on an accent for Atlanta rally,” read one chyron on Fox News. One take on X, typical in its tone on the issue, displays familiarity with the term “code-switching” but frames it as a cynical act: “Code switching is a convenient way to describe blatant pandering.” Of course Trump has joined in asking “Did you hear a new accent?” with his running mate, JD Vance, right behind him claiming that Harris is using a “fake Southern accent.”
First of all, Harris is not doing a “Southern” accent. She is not summoning Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian Fortune Feimster or Rue McClanahan’s Blanche Devereaux. What people are hearing as Southern is Black English with which white Southern English overlaps only partially. Black English has a great many traits alien to white Southern.
More to the point, language is about reaching into another mind. It’s about connecting. Code-switching is one of the ways that humans use language to connect. Using the colloquial dialect of a language serves the same function as drinking or getting a mani-pedi together. It says, “We’re all the same.” It is especially natural, and common, when seeking connection about folksier things or summoning a note of cutting through the nonsense and getting to the heart of things in a “Let’s face it” way. This is why many of us readily say “Ain’t gonna happen” even if we aren’t given to saying “ain’t” regularly.
In a global sense, Harris’s code-switching is completely ordinary. Many people from other countries would be perplexed about anyone thinking her code-switching is remarkable, much less offensive. It is president Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s sprinkling Egyptian Arabic, a colloquial variety, into his speeches that were mainly in the standard variety. It is a restaurant sign in Bavaria that starts out in standard German for “Eating is a need but enjoyment is an art,” but then glides as a “P.S.” into Bavarian dialect to say “Drum schaugst a bissl rei zu uns!” — “So take a little look-in at our place!”
Closer to home, Maya Angelou deftly explained how Black Americans code-switch when she wrote: “We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with, ‘That’s not unusual.’ But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, ‘It be’s like that sometimes.’”
It is in this light that we must evaluate an X post like “It’s pretty weird to change your accent on the fly depending on which audience you’re speaking to.” Wrong. This is like saying it’s pretty weird to dress according to what your plans for the day are.
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John McWhorter
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/opinion/harris-code-switch.html
