I have noticed doing this myself. It takes some time for it to happen. But once I notice it creeping in I am embarrassed and make an effort to stop.
It is a rare situation though.
I can pick up an accent in mere seconds. And I listen to so many audiobooks read by British narrators, that a lot of Britishisms and UK accents have snuck in.
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By the way, I worked with a (Caucasian) woman who worked with a number of non-profit groups. When she was on the phone, we could tell if she was talking to a white person or a person of color. The code-switching was instantaneous … and extreme.
Years later, long after she’d gotten a better job out of state, I mentioned this to a friend (who lived in that state, working for a black church). He stopped me and said "Wait, what was her name? … Oh, my gosh, I was in our church office when she showed up for her first day of work. She’d only been interviewed over the phone by a black woman, and when she showed up everyone started whispering “That’s her?!?” “But…” “She’s NOT BLACK!”
There are videos on YouTube where polyglots meet. They’ll begin talking in one language and the after a while switch to another. When they switch one of them will start in the new language with the common phrases for learning languages, “Hello, how are you”, “It is sunny/rainy/cold today”, “Did you come here on the train”, “can you direct me to the bathroom?”. Those basic phrases seem to kick start their conversational ability. Until it doesn’t, the further they go the less they know of each new language they switch to. Then you can tell that the lack of something to say was the trigger to switching language the whole time.
While speaking louder definitely isn’t the way to go, some aspects of simplifying your speech for an adult English language learner can be counterintuitive. You did mention idioms, but I think most people tend to think in terms of slang and not, say, phrasal verbs (e.g. work [something] out, put [something] off, throw up), which are often harder for a non-native speaker to understand than seemingly more “advanced” words with similar meanings (resolve, postpone, vomit).
I code switch at work in a way that is common for professional women, and requires a lot of reading the room beyond what it takes to just match the person you’re speaking to. On the one hand, if my speech is too feminine–too high a pitch, too dramatic a cadence (oh HEEEY, how have you BEEN???), too many weasely mitigators and conditionals (I’m not a huge fan of… it would be great if you could…)–I risk sounding unprofessional. On the other, if I do exactly as little of that as my male colleagues do, I risk being seen as cold, bitchy, rude, arrogant, demanding, etc. It’s not just about altering my natural speech; it’s about walking the fine line between performing confidence and competence, and appeasing those who might be threatened by that.
I very deliberately code-switch whenever I’m back in the neighbourhood I grew up in, or visiting my parents. My RP-like normal accent - which I use at home, at work, with my friends, when talking to myself - is very removed from the accent of Coloureds on the Cape Flats.
I do something similar in Afrikaans, switching between a Cape accent and a Gauteng one, depending on circumstances.
Having a natively very strong regional accent and having moved to a part of the world with a multi national group of colleagues and friends I absolutely do this.
With family I use my natural accent, at work and in some social situations I tone it down, slow it down and watch the slang I use.
That’s just common courtesy when I want to be understood clearly by as many people as possible and it isn’t a chore at all to do it.
My accent, even moderated, has cost me work previously but that’s fine, any company or person who treats me differently because of it is not worthy of my attention.
Also, I have on rare occaisions chosen not to moderate and given people enough rope to come to their own prejudicial conclusions.
Definitely can identify with this. I’m American, living in Europe. I’m the only native English speaker in my small company, which is very useful, as we do investment-industry compliance services, and English is the common language of finance across the continent. So in addition to my regular job, I write and rewrite all the company comms, and my colleagues frequently ask questions to improve their own English. I am extremely conscious of the different levels of skill and fluency among them, and I constantly adjust the speed and complexity of my speech to accommodate the least fluent person in any group I’m talking to.
This is very true. My children are both fluent in French, and have been told by many French speakers that they sound like (to the point that they were assumed to be) natives. Thing is, there is an everyday version of French where we live, which is considered a “hick” dialect by Parisians, spoken by country rubes. So when we visit Paris, my kids easily switch to “proper” French, and are frequently complimented on their “beautiful” command of the language.
I codeswitch a lot, but maybe one unique dialect is that I can codeswitch to a Utah Mormon, despite having not been a Mormon forever.
It doesn’t come out very often, since I don’t normally talk to Utah Mormons, other than my cousins and mom, but it did come out a few times.
We were up in the American Institute in Taiwan (equivalent to an embassy) renewing my daughter’s passport, and the officer confirmed with me that I was from Utah. He was from Bountiful, a small 99.9% Mormon community just out of Salt Lake City.
He assumed I had gone on an LDS mission to Taiwan and that’s why I had married a Taiwanese woman and settled down here. I explained that I had gone on a mission to Japan. He kept giving off the “We are both Mormons in a Gentile world” vibe, and as fellow insiders, it made the process go much smoother. He waived the requirements to have all the pictures of my daughter for each year and such.
Afterwards, my wife told me that my English sounded “funny” while I was talking to him.
In Japanese, you code switch all the time depending on who you are talking to. Men will use four or five different words for “I” depending on the person they are talking to and their relationship. I first lived in Kyushu and could speak both that dialect and “standard” Japanese.
My accent has always been “southern redneck” and I’ve never consciously tried to change it, short or long term. Sometimes there are negative reactions to it, but it’s never a problem worth worrying about.
As a contract engineer, I spent a great deal of time working in various locales “up nawth” and was amused by the initial reactions to my drawl. I remember a few times telling my wife that coworkers were still assuming I was a dumb hick – but they’d get over it soon enough. And they always did. I got full time offers from every boss after my contracts were over – not a single exception in all those years.
I do some deliberate code-switching. It’s helpful in various ways.
Suppose you grew up as a member of a certain ethnic group and over the years have sort of moved into a situation where you’re not so much part of the “old neighborhood” anymore. When you return or contact the old gang or family, you want for these people to appreciate that you have not rejected your roots and are still a part of the group, despite your current situation. Speaking the shared lingo helps with that.
Similarly, suppose you are still amongst the old group but have certain opinions which are typically opposed by this group and are more common among other groups. By conforming to externalities, you can come off as a member of the group who has differing opinions about certain things, rather than one of “those people”. This can be very helpful in increasing acceptance.
Lastly, when you’re speaking to people who are less educated, it can be helpful to use common slang and mispronunciations and to refrain from “fancy words”, so as to avoid coming off as a snob.
Southerner here. Like a lot of folks I tend to suppress the accent in places where it is not usually heard. At a meeting years back I was having coffee with a colleague from a midwestern organization. As we spoke and got onto non- business topics we both slowly lapsed into our native ‘southern’. Startled both of us when we realized it… I suspect this is common for southerners in the US.
I don’t think most people in this thread are using the term “code-switching” correctly. This term refers to switching between languages (or dialects, or varieties) in a single conversation (or more commonly a single sentence), but most of the examples of “code-switching” presented in this thread are about using different languages with different conversation partners. (For example, @SmartAleq describes call centre agents adapting their speech to whoever is calling, @pulykamell talks about using his native accent (only) with his childhood friends, @China_Guy says that he adapts his English variety when speaking to native Asians, etc.)
However, since I’m really interested in bona-fide code-switching, and don’t want to hijack this thread, I’ve started a new one: Do you (unwittingly) code-switch when speaking?
Back in my college days, a bunch of us were at a summer camp reunion. One guy, originally from the Bronx, had moved to another country just a couple of years earlier, and was back in the States for a visit. He came over to the table that I and a few other friends were at.
He said a bunch of things, but it all went over our heads. We just sat there, silently with jaws dropped, until one of us told him, “Chuck, do you realize that you said that entire paragraph in a perfect [xxx] accent?”
His words, his voice, but he was totally unaware that this accent was one he he recently picked up. Despite using his regular Bronx accent for everything he said before and after this one paragraph.
When I first moved to Britain, I made a point of not adapting my native North American dialect, but after one too many misunderstandings or requests for clarifications, I reluctantly made some concessions. Most of these had to do with word choice—for example, in a pub I’d make sure to order “crisps” instead of “chips” if I wanted potato chips. But I also changed my pronunciation sometimes to avoid ambiguity—in my native dialect, the words “writer” and “rider”, and “latter” and “ladder”, are pronounced identically except for the length of the first vowel. (The medial consonant in both cases is /ɾ/, an alveolar flap.) So I started to make sure that my t’s and d’s were pronounced distinctly, the way I already would if they occurred alone at the beginning of a word. Now that I’m living in Vienna, I still do this when addressing non-native speakers of English, since they’re more likely to have learned the British variety.
When speaking English here, I use some dialectal vocabulary at home but more international terms when speaking with colleagues or strangers. In our apartment, the long upholstered seat is a “chesterfield”, except when we have guests, in which case it’s a “sofa”. Similarly, a hooded sweatshirt is a “kangaroo” to me and my partner but a “hoodie” or “bunny hug” when we need talk about it with others.
I grew up in Baltimore but I never acquired any of the regionalisms. I can’t do the Bawlmer “O” no matter how hard I’ve tried, I don’t call anyone “hon”, and the only time I speak Bawlmerese is when it’s deliberate. But boy, do I recognize it - one time in the Navy, I had an instructor from Dundalk, and I knew it immediately!
On topic - I don’t now that I affect accents, but I do have a tendency to mirror a group’s vocabulary if I’m around them a lot. At my first office job, one of the women there was always saying “Holy Mother!!” and I said it in front of her once without thinking. She thought it was hilarious.
I grew up in an urban ghetto (Mafia stronghold) and spoke with a mild accent until I moved away at age 18–but boy, can I do a strong version of that accent when I need to. I went to graduate school all over the country, and returned to teach at a university in my hometown with a lot of kids from that neighborhood enrolled. I would pull out my accent at times (by then, I had flattened it almost completely, living out of state for nearly twenty years) to illustrate what they sounded like to Middle Americans and to show how much they give away about their origins without thinking about it. At first they thought I was affecting an urban accent but quickly realized that it came naturally, and that the midwestern twang was the artificial one.
Oh, wow. I thought the term was more general and not confined to within a single conversation. I do some of that, too, with my Polish parents, where sentences will have a mix of English and Polish. Your Hungarian example in the other thread is basically how many conversations go with my parents here, with us reaching for the most convenient English word when the Polish one is unwieldy or just less familiar.
There’s a rather lengthy article in Wikipedia called Code-switching. I was fascinated by it. Others on this thread might be too.
I was pretty drunk/high Friday night at a concert in the park in Greensburg. I went to a food booth that has popcorn, but usually runs out at some point. I asked the man in broken English, “do you have the corn that have been popped?”
He answered me very slowly and clearly, “yes, we have popcorn”. After I’d paid he asked me, “where are you from?” I took my change and answered, “Pittsburgh”.
People pick up my Merlin accent. Sometimes they think Phildelfya which has a similar accent, and I did live there later, or just midLantic in general. But it’s clearly Balmer Merlin. I remember my dad laughing his head off when I asked him why people from Maryland didn’t have accents when I was a little kid.