Code-switching: My Voice Heard Best
“Tell me about school,” my mom ordered.
Trying out my new voice, I replied, “They handed me a computer today, and let me tell you…”
My mom formed a face, partly confused, partly disappointed, before snapping: “Stop this nonsense and talk normally.”
That was the last time I intentionally faked an accent.
I speak the same words, in the same language, with the same spelling, but change the audience and my tongue flips from American to Indian without even so much as a notice. When I reflected on the habit, I was ecstatic to find that linguists had already given it a name: “Code-switching.” I was less excited to read the dozens of articles (I remember this one in particular) holding back no punches for the practice, throwing around scary terms like “Forced Conformity,” “Imposter Syndrome,” and, scariest of all, “Inauthentic.” For me, like I suspect for many of you, the switch isn’t faked or forced; The code-switched voice is the real me.
This wasn’t always the case. After spending 9 years in India, I was plopped into an American school (SAIS, for those curious) for the first time in my life, right before Covid started. A culture which I’d only caught glimpses of on Netflix suddenly enveloped every desk, hallway, and classroom. From teachers’ lessons to the hallway chatter, everyone’s voice was ripped straight out of Henry Danger.
Everyone except me.
Fearing my classmates’ blank stares and not “fitting in”, I took note of their Ws and Vs and Ts, building a library of voices to call my own. Come attendance, I took a random voice off the shelf, rushing to scrub away anything foreign as the teacher slowly got to my name.
“Hi, I’m Sidharth” Phew.
For the next three weeks, my imitation was so thick, inconsistent, and incomprehensible that practically everything I said was promptly followed by “Sorry?”, “Huh?”, or worst of all, a silent, blank stare. Each raised hand had my teachers decrypting my answers in real time: their heads tilted, brows raised, and shoulders leaned in. Most unmistakably, that polite half-smile signalled “I want to understand… but I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re trying to say.”
Somewhere between the puzzled looks and another week of “Pardon Me?”s, I realised this wasn’t sustainable. My fake voice alienated the very people I was trying to reach. My turning point wasn’t a decision, but a surrender. Exhausted, I stopped trying to pass off someone else's voice as my own. I settled on a simpler goal: to be understood.
My voice didn’t snap back to what it was. Instead, it began to adapt. At school, my speech rested again, focusing on clarity over conformity—pausing here, rolling there—until others could understand me. At home, my cadence slowed, sanding off the bits that tripped other people off. My voice split, one for home, and one for everyone else. Code-switching became how I adjusted to fit the room, not a mask I hid behind, but a volume slider I tuned.
Plates clink, glasses fog, and the smell of home-cooked food fills the room. Consonants soften, timing relaxes. The dinner table has me saying “please,” “thank you,” and “Can I have more?” in the same cadence and voice my family is familiar with.
Bustling hallways, sneakers squeak and the bell rings for A1. Vowels flatten, r’s sharpen. At school I hear my “what’s up”s and “how’d that go”s turn brisk, “water (vawter)” becoming “water (wahder),” my voice calibrated to the frequency of the room .
The voices may be different, but neither is any less me.