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Confessions of A Code-switching Couple
Confessions of a Code-switching Couple
By Rueben and Golda Amlalo
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My name is Rueben Amlalo. I LOVE soccer. I love to play it, watch it, I even love to read about all things soccer. My rise to “fame and fortune” is due to the fact that I am married to a speech language pathologist who told me all about code-switching when we met about ten years ago.
Hi, I’m Golda! I’m proudly Ghanaian. I love spicy food—the kind that requires water during the meal and that leaves its mark on its way out of your body. I even joke that Ghanaians who don’t like spicy foods aren’t true Ghanaians. I’m fluent in two languages, English and Ga. My younger sister endured severe autism and passed away in February 2020. She is the reason I became a speech language pathologist. I am, therefore, very familiar with code-switching as I have had to work with people of varying cultures, some with disabilities and some who were trying to learn English—mainstream American English.
You might wonder why you are reading this yet again in a different font—trust us, it’s intentional. We are code-switching in this article about code-switching. Welcome to our world as first-generation immigrants. We both migrated to Maryland, USA, from Ghana with our parents and siblings. We knew we would experience new things: new foods, new schools, new neighbourhoods, new friends and new churches. We didn’t realize we would get so intertwined with code-switching.
As a preacher in a multi-ethnic American church context I code-switch all the time when I am preaching. Sometimes it’s deliberate and often it’s subconscious. I mainly code-switch between mainstream American English and African American English (AAE)—never my native Ghanaian dialect. Come to think of it, I never code-switch to address the Africans in my congregation even though I know they are there and outside the pulpit we speak in an African dialect. I do try to preserve my “Ghanaian-ness” in the pulpit by frequently wearing traditional Ghanaian attire when I preach. I believe I code-switch because that’s how my brain works—theologically (or “preachily”) at least. They say when you start dreaming in a language other than your own, it means you are on your way to mastering that language. In the same way, I process theological information and preach both in mainstream American English and AAE because those are the only theologians and...
