We can account for code switching on the basis of linguistic variation, which
exists not only across dialects but also within them. Sources of variation in-
clude age, occupation, location, economic status, and gender. Women, for ex-
ample, tend to be more conscientious about language than men. As a result, in a
family whose dialect is nonstandard, the woman’s language will be closer to
Standard English than the man’s (Trudgill, 2001), especially in situations that
call for Standard English. We therefore may observe a woman using Standard
English in the workplace but nonstandard at home.
The phenomenon of linguistic variation led William Labov (1996) to sug-
gest that every dialect is subject to “inherent variability.” In his analysis,
speakers of a particular dialect fail to use all the features of that dialect all the
time, and the constant state of flux that we see in language causes some de-
gree of variation. This principle accounts for the fact that Standard English
speakers periodically reduce sentences like “I’ve been working hard” to “I
been working hard.” More common, however, is variation of nonstandard fea-
tures to standard features, nearly always as a result of sociolinguistic pres-
sures to conform to the mainstream. On this account, people who speak non-
standard English typically will attempt to adopt Standard features in any situ-
ation in which they are interacting with someone they perceive as socially su-
perior. This effort to conform can be readily observed in classrooms when we
ask students who use nonstandard English to write a paper and then read it
aloud. The writing will contain numerous nonstandard dialect features, but as
the student is reading, he or she will correct many of them. In these cases, the
students are engaged in code switching.
We can learn the degree of bidialectalism of our students from these obser-
vations, which in turn can help us construct assignments and activities that
make students more aware of code switching and their level of Standard Eng-
lish mastery. Also, they teach us that the inherent variability of language
makes dialects unstable and therefore malleable. The language people use at
any given time can be located on a continuum that ranges in some cases from
formal Standard written English to informal nonstandard spoken English.
People move back and forth on the continuum as context demands and as their
linguistic skills allow. This movement can be with different dialects or with
different languages.
When teachers witness code switching on a daily basis, it is easy for them to
assume that students like those reported by Castaneda and Ulanoff (2004) are
simply being perverse when they fail to modify their speech and writing to
Standard English on a permanent basis. Most of the available research on code
switching suggests, however, that it is acquired behavior rather than learned
(Baugh, 1983; Genishi, 1981; Labov, 1971, 1972a, 1972b; McClure, 1981;
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