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I constantly code switched all the time without even realising. I remember when I was younger having to move all around the country and even outside of it. I also remember throughout all of this my voice changing. It would change from being a VERY strong southern accent to a very moletone casual accent. The part that was exceedingly bad about it was the amount of judgment I received in the process. Everywhere I went they said I had an accent because by the time I truly got used to a certain voice I had to move. It’s amazing how much people’s opinions change of you solely because of the way your voice sounds. Your voice is a tricky thing and can make or break your relationships if the other person isn't very fond of it.

    I remember from the very early stages of my life having a very southern accent. I never truly noticed my voice changing until I moved so while I was in South Carolina (my birthplace) I never noticed anything wrong or different with my voice. Since it was normal for everyone else it became normal for me. Along with the voices I heard there, the culture was very different as well. People down south generally group themselves around their families and the families down south are HUGE. Everyone just seems a lot more connected. Also people down south seem to keep themselves busy a lot more often, they never seem to have nothing to do. They also eat a lot more seafood such as: Crabs, shrimp, and clams. Another thing I found that they cared about more was going outside. They always made sure you had enough time outside each day and made sure you didn't come in.

  The next place I remember moving to was Barbados in the Caribbean. They also like A LOT of seafood, I actually kinda believe they like it more. They also like to have a lot of outside time. They are even very connected with one another however not as strongly as they are in the south. However everything is way more fast paced including the speech. The speech there is very hard to comprehend if you have recently come from the U.S. The language there is very slanged and doesn't even seem like English half the time due to it’s very strong accent although I don’t particularly think the people who live and have grown up there believe so. Plus everything comes out with such speed and aggression that sometimes it can be intimidating. I always thought to myself if there is any accent I would least like to be yelled at it is definitely without a doubt a Barbadian one. It just sounds so fierce and aggressive when they are just trying to be gentle. Then when the first time I got yelled at came I didn't know what do because not only was it scary I couldn't even understand. Barbadian voices completely change whenever they have any kind of strong emotion. You can always tell how one another feels just by the way you sound.

 The next place I remember vividly was when I moved to Washington (State). Washington was a very slow paced take it easy laid back sort of State with a voice to match along with it. Everyone there talked so sslllooowww and melancholy I began losing my mind it felt like. I believe that this was one of the hardest transitions for me primarily due to the fact that no one understood me. To them it was like I was speaking Latin, if you asked them what language I was speaking they probably wouldn't be able to tell you. It was so fast and aggressive to them with a few words only used in Barbados. For a few months I was unable to communicate with most people I encountered wilts I was there. When my voice changed I hadn't even realized it I guess it was just a psychological thing because whenever I ask my Mom about it, it was kinda what I expected to happen. My voice slowed down to be on par with everyone else's however I still said a lot of Bajan words. I also still had the accent but, it was like the perfect mixture of the two.

   A couple months after my brother was born there my family moved to Virginia. Nothing really happened here however their speech was a bit quicker and they said my voice sounded funny. However the real memories were from when I moved to New york. It only took a couple of weeks for my voice to adjust back to being faced paced and I immediately gained friends. It was as if my voice made people dislike me prior to it changing. Although I had gotten used to the speech in New York I remember then having to move to Philadelphia. Philadelphia wasn't too much of a change because speech here hardly differed from New York so it was extremely easy for me to adapt to my new environment and make many friends rapidly. So after thinking back to all of this now as a teen and realising how much peoples views/opinions on me changed along with my voice. My voice now changes extremely fast according to whoever I’m speaking with. Code-switching happens all the time sometimes without us ever even noticing but, it can change your whole relationship with somebody from the very first word you speak out of your mouth.

White Boy

Average, bland, plain, boring, and proper english fell out of my mouth every time I talked. It grew into me dashing in a little slang, threw in some philly made words and then add the dominate bland english, congratulations! You have made my voice. My communication tool. I was the white boy, “The inside-out oreo”. I enjoyed it. My friend Vaughn told me “You got the perfect flow of urban and ya whiteness.”

My voice and dialect has changed a tremendous amount for each interaction I have with different people. The interactions are teachers and I, parents and I, family and I, and friends and I. Some interactions with the way I talk has grown more than others like friends and I and parents and I are the two biggest ones that have expanded and grown. A good example of me saying to a friend when I saw him when I was little.

“Hey!” to

“Whats good bro?”

Then the conversation would go something like,

“Want to ask your parents to have a play date after school?”,

and then now it would be

“You wanna chill after school and grub, man?”  

Then my conversations with parents started off as,

“Daddy (or mommy) what’s for dinner?”

and now it would be like

“Yo, what ya gonnna make tonight?”

The transition of our language is just natural, we all do it. We will not live our whole entire life speaking like we are 5 years old but the step into talking like a young adult may be different for all of us. Some people may stick with the complete proper english and talk like that. Some others like me, may make the transition into adding some slang and talking a little more “urban”.

I feel as if the case for me were the multiple transitions of my surroundings. When I was 7 years old I moved from Society Hill where everyone speaks with proper english to West Philadelphia where it starts to get more african american populated. The other big transition in my life was leaving a private school (The Philadelphia School) where everyone responded to proper english. From there I changed schools to a public school (Meredith) where the language completely changed.

There were a lot of things I learned from that school like that South Philly kids talk weird. Water was now “wooder”. I learned what “jawn” meant. “Ratchet” was now a word. Sauce and Gravy had two completely different meanings and “Crayons” was now “Crowns”.

Even the non South Philly kids also had a special way that they talked. “Yo” and “bro” were thrown into every single sentence. We did not eat anymore, we “grubbed”. Wearing nice basketball shoes was now cool and the recess sport was now kickball and not soccer.

At The Philadelphia School, it was only proper english. You never heard “Black English” in the school. It’s not like it was prohibited it was just the amount of african american students in my grade. There were two out of the 36 of us. Then, at Meredith you even heard “Black English” come out of some teachers mouths.  Out of the 62 of us it was probably about around 60% african american and then 30% white. That is when it really started developing into my voice today. It was after the move but when I came to that school it picked up intensely.

I started there in sixth grade and that is the point where we turn into teenagers. It was a really big change for me and I had no clue what to expect from the school. That is when I was “The white boy.” The jokes were all in good fun so that was not a bad thing. As the year went on the way I talked was changing a little bit. I started using some of the slang words, hey turned into yo. He wasn’t my friend, he was my bro. We weren’t a group of friends hanging out, we were homies chilling.

From noticing what everyone has said to me about the way I talk, even things I do notice, I know that I am distinct. I am my self. I enjoy very much being who I am. I come from a proper english Jewish family, and I come from a proper english German family. I am different and it is amazing to know that. Philadelphia itself has made a huge impact on my life. This great, diverse city.

In James Baldwin’s essay; If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? I have found a quote that ultimately describes why my language has changed and how it has changed. “People evolve a language in order to describe, and thus control their circumstances.” What this quote is saying that a language is evolved based on their circumstances meaning what is going on in their lives. My circumstances were living in a heavily white populated neighborhood and then moving to a greatly diverse neighborhood, those were my circumstances thus my language evolved.

                                          Language and Identity                              

    Language, the way you speak, shows a lot about your identity. Where I live, the way I talk might sound really strange to someone who lives in Canada because they’re both different accents. Language has a huge impact on people’s lives. Say if you were going to a job interview and you talk with a kind of slang and the person who is also going for the same interview talk more “properly”, the person who talks in a proper way is more likely to get the job. Why? Because it is easier to understand what they are saying, and they seem more professional. This might not be fair, it might not be your fault if you talk with slang. It might just be where you grew up or the people you were around most could influence the way you speak.

   “Ms. Bier told me my legs were completely bent doing basically every trick. Now she’s making me practice pointing and straightening my legs. I my routine was good, she never comments on the good things I do.”

    “Sometimes when you talk your accent gets really bad. It’s so easy to tell you’re from Roxborough. It’s really funny.” My friend Vanessa really confused me when she said that. What did she mean Roxborough accent? Roxborough’s only ten minutes away from where she lived, she talks the same way I do. My friend would make comments like that all the time, she would say I talked almost as if I was from South Philadelphia, which apparently sounds different from other places in Philadelphia. Vanessa said it’s really easy to tell where I live. That got me thinking about the way I speak. It was the first time someone has ever commented on the way I talk. I didn’t think I sounded any different from the way she did. She almost made fun of the way I would say some words, and would repeat them in almost a mocking way. When she would point out the words I would say “weirdly” I would become very aware of the way I pronounced my words. Before I’d say a word I’d make a conscious effort not to sound like I was from Roxborough because my friend almost made it seem like my accent made me sound dumb. I started to listen to the people from my neighborhood speak, and I too began to think they did have weird accents. Because I was so conscious of the way I talked in front of my friends not from Roxborough, I think I trained myself to lose the accent, if you could even call it that. I would also listen to the way my family spoke to see if I could tell a difference in their voices. I noticed my grandma talked different from my aunt. My grandma was raised in North Philly, and my aunt was raised is Wissahickon. My grandma didn’t have a very distinct way of talking, she talked “normally” but my aunt sounded like most of the people in my neighborhood.

    I’m really aware of the way people, including myself, talk now. I don’t necessarily judge them and put labels on them if they speak different then me. I find it interesting when I listen to the way people in my neighborhood speak, if you go down to lower Roxborough a lot of people have a very distinct way of talking. You can really hear it when they say words with r’s because they kind of drag it out in a way. Now that I pay more attention to speech, I’ve noticed that people that are higher up when it comes to jobs, don’t talk with slang. They pronounce every word in a way that is very clear and understandable. You don’t see a lot of people who speak in almost a slang type way in higher up job. When you think of the president, you think of an all American man or woman who is very proper and prosise not someone who . When people hear someone talking with slang, they assume they are not well educated. That could be why people who talk with slang either change the way the speak so they can have to higher job position, or they do not get hired. Just because someone does talk in slang may not mean they are not well educated.

    I never realized language was a part of my identity. Nor did I realize I had an accent, people from places like where I live generally don’t realize that the way we speak is different. We aren’t really known for our accents like other places may be, like some of the southern states, or Boston. I never realized that it was a part of my identity until it was pointed out to me. Of course, I associated accents with the identity of other people because it was so obvious, if english was their second language. Language is a huge part of everyone’s identity. It doesn’t identify how educated someone is, as many people associate the two. It does however show where you live in the world because of the way you talk. Many people never think of language as something you can be identified with, personally I do.