Palash Week 1 - The Many Voices

 

“What is code switching?” (ABC News: Emma Machan)

I speak differently to almost every person in my life, yet somehow, I never stop being myself. I notice the shift most clearly when I walk through my front door, a dramatic change in tone and even sentence structure.

At school, I say, “I don’t really understand what the author is trying to convey.” At home, that sentence becomes, “I don’t get it.” With my friends, it becomes even simpler, “Bro, what is this?”

All three sentences mean essentially the same thing, but they don’t sound like the same person.

We change the way we speak constantly, often without even realizing it. Around teachers, our vocabulary becomes more selective and careful. Around friends, it often becomes shorter and slangier, and filled with references that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else. Even texting has its own language, full of abbreviations and the occasional “😭” doing the work of an entire sentence.

For the longest time, I thought I had to choose one of these versions to be my entire personality.

But perhaps that is the wrong question to ask ourselves.

Language is not just the way of expressing identity; it is one of the ways different aspects of our identity emerge depending on where we are. We instinctively adjust our words to better fit the people around us because language carries more than just meaning, but also communicates familiarity and distance, respect and informality, humor and seriousness, and most importantly, belonging.

Imagine how strange it would be to text your closest friend as if you were writing an email to your assistant principal. Even though there is technically nothing wrong with it, it would feel intensely unnatural.

That discomfort reveals exactly how deeply language is intertwined with human connection.

The version of myself that exists with my friends and family is not necessarily more authentic than the version of myself in the classroom. Neither one is pretending to be someone they are not. They each reveal different elements of my identity.

Maybe identity is not a single voice waiting to be discovered, but a collection of the voices we develop as we move through the different parts of our lives.

The interesting part is that we rarely choose these “identities” consciously. We just intuitively recognize where each belongs.

Maybe that is why the way we speak can tell us more about ourselves than we realize. The words we choose and the expressions we learn from others all become pieces of the identity we carry from one place to another.