Listening to a podcast with some of my kids this week, I paused when their eyes went glassy and asked them, “Do you understand?” They made that vague sound of wanting to say yes but having to admit that, no. I do not understand.
这周和我的一些孩子一起听播客，当他们的眼睛瞪得像玻璃时，我停顿了一下，问他们：“你明白吗？” 他们发出那种模糊的声音，想说是，但不得不承认，不。 我不明白。
The phrase in question was, “So my Mam went up to yer man”, spoken by Dylan MacCormack on The Moth Podcast. He is from Nenagh, the North Riding capital of my county, Tipperary. I come from the South Riding capital, Clonmel, Abú. And where I come from, the belly of Ireland, this is a problem-free phrase. Mam, short for Mammy, is the common form of address for Mom, Mum, Mother. And “yer man” is that guy. My mother went up to that guy. Aha! Their eyes lit up and we were off once more. When I told them that where I come from, that’s just the way people speak, I could feel the question that they were too polite to ask forming, popping. Why don’t you speak like that?
Dylan MacCormack在The Moth播客上说，有问题的短语是“所以我的妈妈去找你的男人了”。 他来自我所在县的北里丁首府蒂珀雷里（Tipperary）的内纳。 我来自南骑城首府克朗梅尔，阿布。 我来自爱尔兰的腹地，这是一个没有问题的短语。 Mam，Mammy的缩写，是妈妈、妈妈、母亲的常见称呼形式。 「你的男人”就是那個人。 我妈妈去找那个家伙。 啊哈！ 他们的眼睛亮了起来，我们再次离开了。 当我告诉他们我来自哪里，这就是人们的说话方式时，我能感觉到他们太有礼貌了，不敢问形成，突然出现的问题。 你为什么不那樣說話？
Good question.
好问题。
Well, firstly, my Mam sent me to elocution lessons from the tender age of 7 to grind the flat a’s and dead d’s in the “dems and deese and dose” out of my accent. I repeated, “How, now, brown cow”, and, “Any, many, henny, penny”, until the diphthongs shrunk and my vowels became rounded. I read passages from Milton, from Yeats and from C.S. Lewis. At the same time, I started to sound different from my brothers, from my father. The kids in school had yet another reason to disdain me. I learned to flip between these two ways of speaking fluidly.
好吧，首先，我妈妈从7岁开始就派我去上口才课，用我的口音用“dems、deese和dos”磨平a和死d。 我重复了一遍，“怎么，现在，棕色的牛”和“任何，很多，henny，penny”，直到双元音缩小，我的元音变得圆润。 我读了米尔顿、叶芝和C.S.刘易斯的段落。 与此同时，我开始听起来和我的兄弟们，和我父亲不一样。 学校里的孩子们又有理由不理我。 我学会了在这两种流畅的说话方式之间翻转。
Code-switching is when a speaker learns to switch between two languages or language varieties. It was first coined in 1951 by Lucy Shepard Freeland in her book about the indigenous peoples of California, “Language of the Sierra Miwok”. The intermingling of linguistic influences led to a mix of phonetic, syntactical and dialectic elements that was considered substandard at the time. Freeland noted that the lack of ability to communicate in the language of the coloniser led to a shift to the mother tongue in order to express themselves adequately, and later to the formation of pigeon or creole forms of linguistic borrowing that form a third language. Code switching is when the speaker is fluent in both languages. As I came to be, in terms of dialects.
代码切换是指说话者学会在两种语言或语言变体之间切换。 它于1951年由露西·谢泼德·弗里兰在她关于加州土著人民的书《米沃克山脉的语言》中首次创造。 语言影响的交织导致了语音、句法和辩证元素的混合，这在当时被认为是不合格的。 弗里兰指出，缺乏用殖民者的语言进行交流的能力，导致为了充分表达自己而转向母语，后来形成了鸽子或克里奥尔语形式的语言借用，形成了第三种语言。 代码切换是指说话者精通两种语言时。 就我而言，就方言而言。
For as you may well know, the Irish vernacular is poetic, and lyrical, and bordering on the obscene, like angels balancing on the head of a pin. One prime example was the contribution by Irish writer Brendan Behan at an Oxford University debate regarding the difference between poetry and prose. He recited the following rhyme.
因为你可能很清楚，爱尔兰的白话是诗意的，抒情的，接近于淫秽，就像天使在别针头上平衡。 一个典型的例子是爱尔兰作家Brendan Behan在牛津大学关于诗歌和散文区别的辩论中的贡献。 他背诵了以下韵律。
There was a young fella named Rollocks,
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks,
As he walked on the strand
With a girl by the hand,
The water came up to his ankles.
“That, declared Behan, is prose. But if the tide had been in, it would have been poetry.”
“Behan宣称那是散文。 但如果潮流在，那将是诗歌。」
The reasons for code switching are hotly debated in the linguistic community, ranging from the needs of a specific topic, when genre-specific terminology is necessary, the need to fit in or express solidarity, to haggle, to clarify, to quote someone, say something in secret or quite simply, by unconsciously mirroring the person with whom you are speaking.
代码切换的原因在语言学界备受争议，从特定主题的需求，当特定流派的术语是必要的时，需要适应或表达团结，讨价还价，澄清，引用某人的话，秘密或非常简单地说一些话，通过不自觉地反映与你交谈的人。
This is problematic if you are an accent sponge like I am.
如果你像我一樣是口音海綿，那就有問題了。
Living in an international community, in a city twice as big as my little country, diverse vernaculars are kicked around like tin cans. In the English language alone, we have Irish, English, Scottish, Australian, Canadian, American, Indian, African; we’ve got fluent bilingual English speakers of Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish… The variety of lexicons and semantic fields, accents and colloquialisms is staggering, and I have not listed even half of the nationalities present here in Nanjing, I am sure.
生活在一个国际社会中，在一个比我的小国家大两倍的城市里，各种方言像锡罐一样被踢来踢去。 仅在英语中，我们就有爱尔兰语、英语、苏格兰语、澳大利亚语、加拿大语、美国语、印度语、非洲语；我们有流利的双语英语、韩语、西班牙语、法语、德语、葡萄牙语、波兰语……词汇和语义领域、口音和口语的多样性令人震惊，我确信，我甚至没有列出南京这里的一半国籍。
It’s a starburst, a rainbow, a pantheon of dictions and slang and idioms. Each and every one of us code switches every day, perhaps even without knowing it, to enable communication, to build relationships and to perform transactional interactions that allow us to survive and thrive in a megacity that speaks a different language, operates on a different system of cultural norms and mores that we must learn, one way or another.
这是一个星爆，一个彩虹，一个字典、俚语和成语的泛神。 我们每个人每天都在切换代码，也许甚至在不知不觉中，以实现沟通、建立关系和进行交易互动，使我们能够在一个讲不同语言的大城市生存和发展，在我们必须以某种方式学习的不同文化规范和习俗体系上运作。
Many years ago, a friend of mine went to Australia to work for the summer. When her boss asked her to retrieve a certain document, she told him that certainly, she would go take a root in her desk. His eyes popping out of his head alerted her to the fact that somewhere, there had been a misstep in communication. To root for something in Ireland means “to search for”. It means something entirely different in Oz, something usually done in private, something you really don’t want to be chatting casually about with your boss.
很多年前，我的一個朋友去澳大利亞工作過暑假。 当她的老板要求她取回某份文件时，她告诉他，她肯定会在办公桌上扎根。 他的眼睛从头上跳出来，提醒她，在某处，沟通中出现了一个错误。 在爱尔兰，为某事加油意味着“寻找”。 在奥兹，这意味着完全不同的事情，通常私下里做的事情，你真的不想和老板随便聊天。
Code-switching, at times a necessity, at times an adaptation of language or behaviour to maximise the comfort of others and receive more favourable treatment. I wish I could go back to the any-many-henny-penny years and bunk off class and keep my accent. But it’s quite possible that if I ever moved back there, I would reabsorb it naturally. I only have to walk past an accent to assimilate it. Perhaps the years of public speaking honed that ability, perhaps it’s just another tic in my curious neural suite. In any case, the ability to code switch and shift from “footpath” to “sidewalk”, from “tom-ei-to” to “tom-ah-to”, from “Darn-it” to “@#%* it” is a blessing and a curse.
代码切换，有时是必要的，有时是语言或行为的调整，以最大限度地提高他人的舒适度并获得更有利的待遇。 我希望我能回到那些年头，不上课，保持我的口音。 但很有可能，如果我搬回那里，我会自然而然地重新吸收它。 我只需要走过一个口音来吸收它。 也许多年的公开演讲磨练了这种能力，也许这只是我好奇的神经套件中的另一个抽搐。 无论如何，代码切换和从“人行道”到“人行道”，从“tom-ei-to”到“tom-ah-to”，从“Darn-it”到“@#%* it”的能力是一种祝福，也是一种诅咒。
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) points to the social and psychological repercussions of code-switching, in which diminished authenticity can lead to hyper-vigilance or even burnout. They recommend promoting diversity and representation in the workplace to reduce the need for code-switching in the first place. As per their 2019 article, “The Costs of Code-Switching”, HBR states, “In addition to focusing on diversity, organisations need to create inclusive environments for employees to feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work”.
《哈佛商业评论》（HBR）指出了代码切换的社会和心理影响，其中真实性的降低可能导致过度警惕甚至倦怠。 他们建议促进工作场所的多样性和代表性，以减少对代码切换的需求。 根据他们2019年的文章“代码切换的成本”，HBR表示，“除了关注多样性外，组织还需要创造包容性的环境，让员工感到舒适地将真实的自我带到工作中”。
It may be too late for accent V1.0, but not to start bringing more of our authentic selves to the table, and encouraging others to do so too. Just like allyship, it’s not enough to passively promote inclusion. We need to fly those freak flags high and proud, embrace difference as delightful and celebrate the things that make us stand out from the crowd, rather than homogenise them.
口音V1.0可能为时已晚，但不要开始将更多我们真实的自我带到餐桌上，并鼓励其他人也这样做。 就像盟友一样，仅仅被动地促进包容性是不够的。 我们需要高高在上自豪地悬挂那些怪异的旗帜，把差异当作快乐来拥抱，并庆祝那些让我们从人群中脱颖而出的事情，而不是将它们同质化。
Now there’s a cause to root for!
现在有一个值得支持的原因了！