For years, my writing was “too informal” for academia. Then it was “too bulky” for the internet. Later, doing inclusion work with corporate clients — I watched language get used as a measuring stick for who gets to hold power in a room, and who has to keep proving they belong there.
I didn’t have a name for what that cost me physically until much later: and it’s something that those with hard-to-place names and faces can recognize immediately…
The jaw that tightens before a meeting where you know you’ll have to sound a certain way. The shoulders that creep up toward your ears mid-sentence, deciding in real time which “version” of you is acceptable here. The held breath right before you switch registers, switch tone, or switch which parts of you get airtime. The way all of this amplifies when doing it in your second, third or eighth language — in a room with different cultural norms than your passport country.
I’ve been thinking about this again recently, after watching a wave of writers here on Substack get told their fluency read as suspicious — too smooth, too effortless, somehow inauthentic. I wrote about that moment separately, and you can read it here if you want the fuller thread.
The pattern underneath it isn’t new because I know it well: cultural code-switching.
Cultural code-switching vs. code-switching
Code-switching isn't a term that belongs to me. It comes from the Black American experience and became a formal concept in linguistic research starting in the 1970s, linked to W.E.B. DuBois's concept of double consciousness: the need to shift between Standard English and African American English to navigate a world that perceives these two language forms very differently.1
What I present here is my effort to build on that foundation on how it shows up across cultures and countries; not to replace it.
The kind of “switching between selves” I’m discussing today is what long-term expats, immigrants, and third culture kids experience across borders and languages every day.
Cultural code-switching is a parallel experience. It’s one thing to survive systemic racism as the original term describes. It’s quite another to talk about belonging, safety, and legibility in a place that wasn’t designed with you in mind — especially if it operates in a different cultural register than where you or your parents grew up.