Code-switching: competence, cost, and context

Code-switching: competence, cost, and context

I recently wrote about minority stress and about authenticity as an ideal, two questions that are closely connected in my thinking about coaching. Minority stress concerns the psychological and practical effects of living in environments shaped by prejudice, exclusion, or the expectation of rejection. In the piece on authenticity, I questioned the assumption that a person should always be able to express a stable and transparent “true self” across different contexts.

Code-switching brings these questions together. In its original linguistic sense, the term refers to movement between languages, dialects, or registers in response to a particular setting. In psychological and organisational research, it has acquired a wider meaning. It can include adjustments in speech, appearance, behaviour, emotional expression, and self-disclosure, made in response to the expectations of a social environment (Johnson et al., 2022). This linguistic understanding of the term describes an activity that most people undertake in some form. We speak differently in a formal meeting than with close friends, adjust our vocabulary when entering an unfamiliar professional field, and decide which parts of our private life belong in a particular conversation.

For members of minority groups, however, code-switching can acquire a different intensity and significance. The adjustment may be connected to an assessment of safety, professional credibility, or the likelihood of being treated with respect. A migrant may simplify their language, alter their accent, avoid humour, or minimise the expression of expertise when they expect their speech to be read as evidence of foreignness or incompetence. A queer person may speak openly about a partner in one setting and avoid any reference to their relationship in another, because the response remains unclear or because disclosure could have material consequences. These are forms of situational judgment that emerge within unequal distributions of social risk.

The unequal labour of adaptation

It is important to recognise that code-switching is a general feature of social interaction while also recognising that its demands are not distributed equally. Research on linguistic racism describes how the communicative practices of Black people and other people of colour can be marked as inappropriate or unprofessional in ways that comparable variation among White speakers often is not. In this context, changes in language or self-presentation can become a response to anticipated stereotyping, discrimination, or exclusion (Johnson et al., 2022).

The person who repeatedly has to assess whether their natural way of speaking will be accepted develops a particular kind of situational attentiveness. They observe tone, register, gesture, and the implicit norms of an institution. They anticipate how an interaction partner may interpret them and adjust their own presentation before the interaction has properly begun. Johnson et al. (2022) describe this process through concepts such as mentalizing and stereotype threat: the person expends cognitive effort trying to understand how others are likely to perceive them and whether their identity will be treated as a source of negative judgement.

This kind of effort can become exhausting. It can reduce the opportunity for a person to be recognised as they understand themselves, and it can create a persistent distance between preferred self-expression and the version of oneself that appears necessary in a given environment. The issue is not that adaptation itself represents a personal failure. The issue concerns the social conditions that make certain people adapt more frequently and at greater cost.

When self-preservation feels like pretence

For migrants, queer people, racialized individuals, and other minority groups code-switching can generate an experience of discontinuity between contexts. Someone may feel articulate, humorous, and at ease among friends who share their language or history, then become quieter, more cautious, or more formal in a workplace, a family setting, or an encounter with an institution. A queer person may develop different forms of self-presentation according to whether gender identity or sexuality can be safely acknowledged. A migrant may speak with reduced complexity in an acquired language and later feel that they have appeared less educated, less mature, or less capable than they know themselves to be.

These experiences can produce shame (I will talk about shame in a future blog piece). A person may conclude that they are pretending, that they have betrayed something essential about themselves, or that their different ways of appearing reveal a lack of integrity. The ideal of authenticity can intensify this shame by suggesting that psychological health requires a stable and transparent form of self-expression across every setting.

I find this interpretation too harsh and too detached from the realities of unequal environments. Code-switching can function as self-preservation. It can protect access to work, reduce exposure to hostility, and allow a person to maintain relationships in contexts where disclosure carries risks. Its necessity may still be painful, and its cumulative cost deserves attention. Yet the person’s adaptation should first be understood as an intelligent response to the conditions they are navigating.

Research on racial code-switching in the workplace demonstrates the complexity of this situation. In experimental studies, Black employees who engaged in racial code-switching were perceived as more professional by both Black and White evaluators, a finding that reveals how institutional ideas of professionalism can reward adaptation to dominant cultural norms (McCluney et al., 2021). A separate study of 286 frontline hospitality employees found that racial code-switching was associated with greater intention to leave the industry through a sequence involving identity threat, shame, and depression (Garlington et al., 2023). These findings show how a strategy that may support immediate acceptance can also carry significant psychological and professional consequences over time.

Competence developed under pressure

Repeatedly moving between different social worlds can cultivate a distinctive set of relational and communicative capacities. People who do this often become highly skilled at reading environments, understanding group dynamics, and communicating across difference. They may have an unusually refined awareness of timing, tone, and relational boundaries. These capacities can be valuable in leadership, education, mediation, and coaching.

At the same time, the language we use requires caution. A competence developed under pressure should not become a reason to accept the pressure that produced it. Although I sometimes like to call the skill of code-switching a “superpower”, this can obscure the fact that some people have had to acquire this sensitivity because the consequences of misreading a setting were more serious for them than for others. The capacity deserves recognition. The institutional norms that demand its continual use deserve examination.

This distinction is particularly important in the context of organisations. An institution may value diversity in principle while continuing to reward a narrow model of professionalism in practice. If employees are expected to make their language, appearance, or emotional style more acceptable to a dominant group, then the organisation transfers the labour of inclusion onto those who are already marginalised. McCluney et al. (2021) argue for an expanded understanding of professionalism that can accommodate a wider range of cultural norms and communicative practices.

Code-switching in coaching

In coaching, the first task is to make code-switching visible without treating it as a pathology or a personal deficit. A coachee may describe exhaustion after work, a sense of distance from colleagues, or shame about behaving differently in different settings. These experiences can be explored through questions about context: When does the person change their language, manner, or level of disclosure? What do they anticipate might happen if they did not? What does the adjustment protect? Where has it begun to cost too much?

Such questions can shift the coachee’s interpretation from self-criticism toward a more precise analysis of their environment. The person may recognise that a particular adaptation has supported their safety or professional position. They may also identify settings in which they would like to claim more room for their preferred way of speaking or relating. These decisions require careful consideration, especially where employment, family relationships, or legal security are involved. Coaching has no grounds for urging disclosure or visibility as a universal ideal.

The work can also connect code-switching with the coachee’s broader support system. Who offers contexts in which they do not need to translate themselves for others? Which colleagues, communities, or relationships allow them to speak with greater ease? Where can they recover from the vigilance required in less affirming environments? These questions treat belonging as a resource rather than a private reward for successful adaptation.

Code-switching becomes a useful concept in coaching because it makes visible a form of labour that often remains unnamed – and we know from the coaching practice how important is to name things. It allows people to recognise the intelligence embedded in their adaptations, to reduce shame about strategies of self-preservation, and to examine their costs with greater honesty. The longer-term task also belongs to institutions: creating environments in which a wider range of voices, languages, and forms of presence can be received without requiring people to make themselves smaller in order to belong.

References

Garlington, J., Shum, C., Wong-Padoongpatt, G., & Book, L. (2023). “What it do?” The effects of racial code-switching on industry turnover intention. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 35(11), 3864–3882. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-11-2022-1335

Johnson, D. G., Mattan, B. D., Flores, N., Lauharatanahirun, N., & Falk, E. B. (2022). Social-cognitive and affective antecedents of code switching and the consequences of linguistic racism for Black people and people of color. Affective Science, 3(1), 5–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00072-8

McCluney, C. L., Durkee, M. I., Smith II, R. E., Robotham, K. J., & Lee, S. S. L. (2021). To be, or not to be… Black: The effects of racial codeswitching on perceived professionalism in the workplace. Journal of experimental social psychology, 97, 104199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104199