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Why do approximately 80% of people wearing t-shirts to make a statement look like they've never worn a t-shirt before?
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I know of code switching but I wasn’t really aware that it’s not widespread amongst white Americans either.
Over here in Flemish Belgium, pretty much every town and region has its own dialect. Even my town of 2000 people.
Some dialects like the regional dialect from the West-Flanders province is damn near unintelligible if they don’t heavily tone it down.
Our dialects aren’t merely differing in pronunciation but many dialects also have their exclusive terminology. That previously referenced West-Flanders dialect is particularly egregious when it comes to replacing words or entire expressions that are only understood by people familiar with said dialect.
I don’t really have a strong dialect but I do tone it down for work.
To further emphasise the impact of dialect, the Dutch we learn in school is referred to as “algemeen beschaafd Nederlands (ABN)”, which translates to “general civilized Dutch.”
My Office Manager is literally the only person I know who regularly speaks ABN, and I know from personal experience she’s hiding a pretty strong Ghent dialect. I can’t think of anyone else who even bothers trying, they just tone down their dialect depending on the circumstances.
Belgium and the Netherlands (to a lesser extent) are a bit unique when it comes to the sheer numbers and variety of dialects but I assumed code switching was a pretty natural occurrence in most countries.
Very interesting post, I love any and all insights into the socio-linguistic situations that exist around the world. The more localized and/or class stratified the dialects and the more politically charged the minority languages, the more it interests me.
Obviously, Belgium is in an elite status by those metrics.
In the US, probably a slight majority of whites spend their whole life in a monolingual, monodialectical milieu.
If you’ve lived in different regions of the US, lived in a big city, been to college, and/or do business nationally or internationally, you become knowledgeable about code switching.
The group of white people I just described, leans heavily Democratic. But if you are a white, local elite or a worker unable or unwilling to relocate or go to college, you may not know about code switching and those groups are the backbone of the GOP. The purple parts of America, the suburbs, had been less cosmopolitan in the past. More recently, they’ve become a mix of cosmopolitan as well as parochial.
Many of the fiercest, nastiest fights in local politics are over whether or not local government, especially school districts, will uphold newer the newer cosmopolitan values or will they uphold the older more parochial world view that used to dominate the area.
In the suburbs, you can have someone who went to college 1,000 miles away, moved back home, and now commutes into the city and works for a multinational corporation, has a dialectically diverse workplace, and is on phone calls all day with people from different dialectical zones. So you have neighbors in very different epistemological silos.
All this is a long way to say that Republicans tend to be the whites who do not know about code switching and most white Democrats do know about code switching.
But of course, the white Republicans on Twitter absolutely DO know about code switching so their reaction to Harris was in bad faith.
It's amazing that everything conservatives accuse the media of doing,
They are doing the same thing but like 100000x worse.
They freaked out for years about progressive partisan influence over social media moderation.
...Elon buys twitter that and explitley spits out and promotes conservative propaganda.
They accuse the media of being "the enemy of the people"
...meanwhile prominent conservative commentators are just straight up being paid by the russian government to destabilize American society.
clearly he likes to have right wing kooks and weirdos on,
Im just saying that even if you want to have left wing people on,
when have this censorious attitude on the left it will skew the show even further right
Censoring….like bringing on Gov Abbot, who’s banning books about racism or Black Authors. Literal “censorship”
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It’s sad you buy into this framing. You should know better, but you’re being intentionally obtuse to what’s obvious in front of you
Listen to him for Snoop dogg, or whatever apolitical entertaining guest he has on his show.
But don’t pretend like what he does isn’t intentional.
Why do approximately 80% of people wearing t-shirts to make a statement look like they've never worn a t-shirt before?