Alfaro, Ph.D., is associate vice president of international affairs and professor of multilingual and global education at San Diego State University. She lives in Escondido. The visceral and powerful ...

Have you found yourself altering how you speak when you find yourself in a more formal situation? Do you tone down your accent or stay away from words that may only be known in the area you are from?

In sociology, code switching is when a person alters their speech to conform to different cultural norms. For example, marginalized people may use one way of speaking around their community and ...

"Every single one of us has our own understanding about code-switching. In my world, it's the code-switching of my gender, of how I express myself with my ethnicity. And sometimes, you know, sometimes ...