Code shifting

If it’s most, can we call it a clique?

For there’s more than one language they speak

When I’m using my Spanish

My blues they will vanish

When I go on a code-shifting streak

Synopsis: I’m a Family Practitioner from Sioux City, Iowa.  In 2010 I danced back from the brink of burnout, and, honoring a 1-year non-compete clause, traveled and worked in out-of-the-way places in Alaska, Nebraska, Iowa, and New Zealand.  After 3 Community Health years, I took temporary gigs in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Canada, and Alaska.  Since the pandemic, I did telemedicine, staffed a COVID-19 clinic in Iowa, worked at the Veterans Administration in South Dakota, held part-time positions close to home, worked 10 weeks in western Pennsylvania, had a 5-month assignment in Northern Iowa, then several months of telemedicine.  I am now in Texas, a big place with a lot of Spanish speakers. 

Most people who take high school Spanish forget almost all of it within 6 months of graduation. I can point to one 6-week episode in 9^th grade when the teacher declared, “These are the last words of English you will hear in my class.”  I reached fluency quickly though it took me years to build vocabulary.

The majority of the people in this area have Spanish surnames, but only about 10% lack mastery of English.  But Spanish fluency seems to be proportional to age.

Texas started as a province of Mexico.  The history since, loaded with nuance and subtlety, deserves volumes.  The Hispanics here have US lineages that go back much further than the paltry 100 years or so that my family has lived in this country.  And if you want to go further back, many have Indigenous roots. 

I took 4 years of high school Spanish and one year of college literature, but, aside from those critical 6 weeks in 1965, those years have little to do with the language I speak. 

I went into private practice in Iowa just before the meat packing industry, always reliant on laborers with little English, attracted workers from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, and Colombia.  Over the next decades, I heard Sioux City generate its own Spanish accent and listened the accent morph. 

So when I got here I asked some vocabulary questions:  Do we call the people who take off and put on shingles techeros or ruferos?  When we give directions do we talk about blocas or qudrados?  Is a Ford 150 a troque or a camioneta?

The bilinguals here say they speak Tex-Mex rather than Spanish.  But that would be like saying I speak Iowish because I don’t call a truck a lorry. 

Recently, the shift in languages has started to impact English.  Perfectly acceptable constructions here now include Get down from the car and I drink that pill in the morning.

The people in the UK who listen to American English say we dwell too long on our syllables.  And to a limited extent I can hear parallel differences when comparing Mexican Spanish to Tex-Mex. 

Linguists call dancing between two or more languages ‘code shifting.’  Some words or phrases are easier in one language than another, and I use those shortcuts when I can. 

Every time I switch languages I get a little jolt of endorphins. I suspect that most bilinguals experience the same enjoyment.   

Tags: bilingual, code shifting, ruferos and techeros, Spanish, Spanish fluency, Tex-Mex, troque and camioneta