Growing up in my predominately white town, I was often asked to “speak Indian” – which, besides being an ignorant request, was honestly a hard one with which to comply. I shied away from any marker of my “otherness,” especially something as obvious as language.

In college, one of my parents called me late at night when I was with a close friend. In my hazy, sleepy state, I instinctively answered in Marathi, a language spoken in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Yet, I had never spoken Marathi in her presence before. Marathi is a symbol of security to me – my mother tongue and the language I use with those closest to me. To let someone else into that blanket of security was a big moment, and it was gratifying to not have to compartmentalize my identity with her after that.

There is a lot going on linguistically in my family. We are multilingual, multicultural, interracial immigrants and members of the Indian diaspora – to name a few components of our identity. But what strikes me as more interesting is how we so easily navigate and display our layered identities in conversation through “code-switching”.

Code-switching is typically defined in linguistics as a mixing of languages and speech patterns in conversation. At any given time my family speaks in at least three different languages – Marathi, English, and Hindi – simultaneously. It’s so normal to engage in code switching that I didn’t realize it happened so often until a friend pointed it out after having dinner with my extended family.

I understand and can speak four different languages to varying degrees. Even before I knew what code-switching was, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t naturally just navigate my life using different languages.

My parents both grew up in Madhya Pradesh, a state in the central part of India, where Hindi is the most common language. However, my family is originally from the west Indian state of Maharashtra, where most people speak Marathi. My parents grew up speaking both languages and English. I was born in India, but grew up in the United States. I learned Marathi and English almost simultaneously, while learning Spanish at school and picking up Hindi from Bollywood movies.

Languages, and location, affect what we say, and how. When my parents speak Hindi in the US, the words come out tentatively, as if they have forgotten how to string them together. When they speak Hindi in India, however, it is like hearing sounds of relief from someone who’s just come home from a long day. The words come out slower, relaxed, and filled with long pauses as if there is all the time in the world to talk.

Lately, I am finding it easier to code-switch in the presence of non-family. As I have grown to appreciate my intersectional identities, my code-switching has become more deliberate, to highlight, for example, the pronunciations of names and places in their proper tongue. And the more I pay attention to code-switching around me, the less it seems to juxtapose with the dominating American English.

As I look around the dinner table with my parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends and realize how many different experiences are actually being conveyed through the languages spoken, the switches seem necessary - and wholly enriching.



