As another dumb white guy, one that decided to branch out of my comfort zone in grad school for a HBCU, one that works with GLBTQ, one that is comfortable in my church, one that lived in a wealthy part of the north to my father being laid off and moving south of Little Rock, and one that works in the sciences as well as the administration of a Big 10 university…

I have learned vernacular does not inform the intelligence of another. It informs only background. I have learned to code switch myself in various settings, however I also know that my default patterns will benefit me the most if I want solely to seem better than others. However, I know I am not better than others…I am only different.

And to me, this is where codeswitching is useful. When I am in the south, y’all is reintroduced into my dialect. When I’m in my church, have an awesome day is replaced by have a blessed day. When I’m around my friends of minority culture, I lay off the twenty dollar words that are commonplace within my institution but may be offputting and bougie. It isn’t that I want to talk down to anyone…it’s that I don’t want to talk above them if I want to be equal.

In the end, language is an artificial construct intended to convey information. We all speak slight variations of the language. Within American English, we have no Queen’s English…and if we did, we’d find it offensive as a whole. And yet if we find a culture we consider ‘lesser’ we try to burden them with our own rules and syntax.