During the stillness of the pandemic lockdown, I was chatting and laughing on a late-night call with my high school friends. At some point, my mother walked into my room and began talking to me — without thinking, my accent shifted. I exaggerated my T’s and D’s, and rolled my R’s, sounds that my friends on the phone certainly weren’t used to. They laughed, taken aback by these unexpected changes in my voice. “You sound completely different,” I remember them saying. To them, my Urdu cadence felt foreign compared to the Americanized style of speech I had used with them. 

This was the first time I was called out for code-switching, a term I didn’t even know existed until a few months later. That moment became a window into a phenomenon I had been unconsciously practicing for years: ‘unrolling’ my R’s for school presentations, slowing down my speech with teachers, and thickening my American accent when I needed to project confidence. 

It was only with my South Asian friends that I’d let Urdu words pepper my speech, which felt like reintroducing a sense of familiarity, as warm as my mother’s hug, to my spoken language, which had begun to feel split.

I came to realize that this constant switching of linguistic gears wasn’t just a cute quirk I occasionally caught myself doing. I became torn between whether my code-switching was merely an effort to adapt to my diverse range of environments, or a harmful way of compromising my authentic self. I wasn’t sure whether the two were one in the same. 

I asked myself these questions when I stepped foot on the U of T campus over a year ago. Was code-switching a survival skill, a hidden cost of belonging, or a subtle tool of oppression? Could it be all three at once? 

Defining code-switching

Code-switching can be defined as the conscious or unconscious shift in language, accent, tone, or behaviour to align with different social settings.

Linguists have long studied how bilinguals have transitioned smoothly between languages, but code-switching extends beyond that. It can be the decision to smooth out your hair before a job interview, or to leave your religious pendant at home, ‘just this once.’ 

These are subtle negotiations made to meet the expectations of others, not just random choices for self-presentation. They reveal the pressure and costs of social acceptance.

As a 2023 University of California, Berkeley article puts it, code-switching functions as a strategic “chameleon effect ” that allows people to adapt to different social environments by shifting their speech, behaviours, and therefore how they present their identities to others. Like a chameleon blending into its surroundings, these changes can go unnoticed by those around them. 

This constant practice of adapting can be both helpful and harmful, depending on how and when you use it. For some, code-switching can be used to exercise agency and strength. “[W]hen I choose to code-switch strategically, I see it as adaptability and a strength of my linguistic capabilities,” wrote Rayn Lakhani, a second-year peace, conflict and justice student, in an email to The Varsity.

For others, like second-year architecture student Obiajulu Udemgba, code-switching can feel like a form of personal erasure in favour of social acceptance. “I now mourn the elements of my cultural identity that I feel I may never get back,” Udemgba told me. “I no longer have what most would call a Nigerian accent. This seems to help my palatability when answering the cellphone or working in public services; however, it has also extinguished the linguistic element of my cultural identity that once deeply defined me.” 

Personal perspective

As a Pakistani who has lived in five countries, I’ve never had the certainty of a single accent. In the US, I learned to adopt an American rhythm from my peers and teachers, which helped me blend in at school. 

When I moved back to Pakistan, relatives and friends teased me when my American accent crept into my Urdu. They’d call me the burger, sometimes even the gora pakora — slang terms meaning I was too Western for my own good, or that I was a brown kid trying to act white.

Code-switching wasn’t something I planned to do; instead, it acted as a means of social survival. With friends, it allowed us to bond through shared dialects and humour; with professors, it seemed to make me ‘polished’ — I was a brown kid who could negate it with my English words. 

Between being made fun of by my Pakistani friends and being praised for seeming polished in the US, I became conflicted about whether code-switching was entirely good, bad, or some muddy blend of both. Was I simply performing a different ‘self’ for different audiences? Was it possible that, by adapting, I could create the truest expression of my identity?

In my freshman year at U of T, I expected the school’s diversity to ease the burden I had begun to feel about constantly code-switching. Instead, I found new layers of contradictions in deciding whether code-switching was harmful or helpful. I conversed with students who spoke about ‘standard’ English as if it were morally superior, while accents carried negative presumptions. 

Throughout my interviews with U of T students, I learned that for many students, code-switching is a tool to navigate an academic system that privileges certain norms of speech and behaviour. Diversity is celebrated, but the irony is that code-switching, often practiced by students who embody that diversity, can end up reinforcing linguistic homogeneity. 

Student perspectives 

Second-year English and political science student Pilar Amparo Dominguez wrote in an email to The Varsity that she felt like she was “received more positively as an international student if [she spoke] English with a standard North American accent.” Otherwise, she was immediately differentiated and met with “questions about [her] background.” 

This othering is what makes some people feel obligated to code-switch. However, for Daniel Park, a second-year Korean-Canadian Rotman Commerce student, code-switching isn’t about assimilation, but negotiation. When different cultures come together, being ‘Canadian’ becomes about being “tolerant, accepting, and inclusive,” he said. 

Lakhani took a more ambivalent view, seeing code-switching at U of T as an “iceberg.” 

“On the surface, [code-switching] can promote inclusion because it allows people from diverse backgrounds to connect and collaborate more easily,” wrote Lakhani. “But at a deeper level, it almost feels as though students must conform to dominant narratives of speaking and being. So on an outer level, it feels like a smoother way of promoting diversity, but at the same time, concealing the pressures it takes for many students to belong.” 

Gabriela Quiroga, a second-year environmental studies and political science student, who has lived in Colombia, Chile, Sweden, and now Canada, described how accents are the dominant form that her code-switching takes. 

During an Uber ride with her friends, Quiroga recounts slipping into her Brazilian accent out of fatigue, saying her friend “teased [her] a little bit because of it.” But this teasing was only friendly, since Quiroga’s friend is Filipina and “has a Spanish background.” Quiroga explained that when there’s a similar cultural context, she feels more comfortable showing both aspects of her life. “It depends really on where my friends are from. If they have sort of a Latin background… I feel a bit more comfortable code-switching, and I feel like I do it automatically.” 

Dominguez also described how highlighting accents in her code-switching practice allows her to connect with people of similar cultural backgrounds. 

“Speaking with a Filipino accent makes it very easy to befriend other Filipinos,” she wrote, “especially those working at the coffee shops on campus. I have seen how they more easily warm up to me even if I’m just speaking English with an accent.”

Arhaan Lulla, a third-year student studying criminology and political science, noticed that even his politics seemed to shift with his tongue: speaking Hindi, he felt “more conservative;” in English, “more liberal.” His experience reveals how code-switching extends beyond the phonetics of accents or grammar, and into how we think.

Professional pressures and double-edged swords

While classrooms demand more subtle forms of code-switching, professional spaces seem to require it more dauntingly. Second-year public health and psychology student Pinar Ari recounted how she avoids disclosing her cultural identity in job interviews until after she gets hired because you can never “guarantee that there won’t be any other factors… involved in the hiring other than my skills.” Ari alludes to her fear of biases that employers might have about characteristics like ethnicity or cultural background, which are irrelevant to one’s work skills.

For many students — myself included — an English vocabulary and accent have become professionalized since they are often associated with success in academic and professional settings. Having the ‘right’ language, vocabulary, and even mannerisms can get you into rooms you might otherwise never have known existed. Code-switching can thus act as a coat of armour in professional spaces. It’s a way of gaining validity with people who don’t share our cultures or languages. But armour is heavy, and constantly taking it off and putting it back on can make us fatigued, hypervigilant, and burnt out.

Lulla echoed the frustration that comes with overthinking how you’ll translate what you want to say before you say it. “If you’re just concerned about sounding a particular way, the entire point [of what you’re trying to say] is gone.” For him, clarity matters more than the sense of ‘prestige’ that comes with speaking a Westernized accent or vocabulary. I agree with Lulla — accents should be spoken with confidence, not erased out of fear.

What bothers Lulla most is the performative aspect he and his friends take on when they code-switch. When his friends moved from Bombay to Canada, they “developed an accent” which Lulla admits became irritating for him, because it felt “like they’re putting up a show.”

Lakhani contended with Lulla’s frustration at this sense of contradiction and inauthenticity that comes from constantly code-switching. “When I choose to code-switch strategically, it feels like power. But when it’s forced, it feels like loss.” 

Dominguez offered that “code-switching to fit in with the majority population could be a loss of diversity.” At the same time, she acknowledged that code-switching can also “reflect an individual’s skill and journey moving from culture to culture… As long as the code-switching isn’t a result of shame then it can showcase diversity of life experience as well.”

For many students, code-switching acts as a double-edged sword.

Cultural closeup

For South Asian students like me, slipping Urdu or Hindi slang into English conversations is a signal of cultural closeness, a shorthand that says we understand each other. 

In conversations that extend beyond this subtle South Asian closeness, our slang often gets lost in translation. Lulla laughed about trying to explain jhuttha — a South Asian slang term which in this context meant once someone bites your food, you can’t finish it — to those unfamiliar, explaining that “there’s just no English equivalent.” For him, code-switching in English means the absence of entire South Asian concepts and thus moments of closeness.

For me, in those rare spaces with friends who share the same language or accent, the urge to overthink and perfect our words disappears. What’s left is a kind of relief: the freedom to simply speak, unmeasured and unperformed.

I think back to that call with my friends, when my mother walked in, and my speech changed when I talked to her. Back then, it felt like a harmful slip; a failure to conceal two divided selves I held inside. Now, I read that moment differently. Rather than a loss of one or another identity, it was evidence that identity isn’t singular; it shifts and multiplies.

In the end, Lulla said that “people should be comfortable in the way that they speak, in terms of their accents, because that will help them out in the long term. If you’re insecure about the way you speak, you’re not going to be able to communicate your thoughts.” 

At U of T, code-switching has been both a gift and a burden. It has taught me how to navigate classrooms and peers fluidly, but it has also left me wondering where my cultural and linguistic performance ends and I begin.

Maybe code-switching can never be deemed wholly good or wholly bad. Like a painter reaching for a new brush or palette, we shift tones to express different truths. But I think institutions like U of T have a long way to go in creating an academic space where students don’t have to code-switch to belong.

Ari recalled how her parents once asked her to help them “get rid of their accents.” She pushed back: “Why would you want to? Your accent is proof you speak more than one language. That’s something to be proud of.”