The Art of Code-switching

Code-switching is really about moral imagination, says Jide Ehizele.

After graduating from university, I lived in Nigeria for around thirteen months. It was a period intended not only to reconnect with my heritage, but also to give me space to reflect on the kind of career I wanted to pursue. In the end, I gained far more than I expected. This article explores one of the ideas that emerged during that formative time.

I cannot remember exactly how many months into my Nigeria stay this happened, but by then I was largely settled. I recall a conversation with someone close to me at the time — someone I would consider a mentor — who paused mid-discussion and said, “You are the first person I’ve ever met who has used the word ‘random.’”

At the time, I didn’t give the remark much thought. I assumed it reflected a simple linguistic gap. After all, vocabulary varies across communities; even within the UK, language shifts noticeably from one region to another. But in retrospect, I realised that this was not merely a linguistic difference. It was a metaphysical one.

Within the Nigerian moral imagination, there is no such thing as ‘random’ — certainly not in the context of everyday life, including the mundane. This is a society shaped by a supernatural worldview, in which divine providence governs the trajectories of human lives, rather than the flimsy notion of chance. What I initially mistook for a difference in vocabulary was, in fact, a difference in how reality itself is understood.

We often treat grammar and language as matters of style or aesthetics, flattening their deeper significance. Yet language always carries assumptions about agency, causality, and meaning.

Code-switching, then, is not simply about changing vocabulary. It is about moving between moral worlds, each with its own understanding of how the world works and what it means to be human.

Some of you may have heard the term code-switching. It usually refers to the practice of shifting between two or more languages, dialects, accents, or communication styles depending on social context. Most often, it is used to describe the navigation between professional life — formal, restrained — and local or communal settings, where speech is looser and more familiar.

A simple example can be found in something I described in my previous piece: speaking in an MLE-inflected dialect in the barbershop, then later attending a Christian humanism conference that demands an entirely different lexicon. In popular usage, code-switching is framed as a matter of minority adaptation, professional polish, or cultural camouflage.

These accounts, however, are insufficient. They assume that culture is thin — that language is primarily about surface aesthetics or social performance. In doing so, they overlook deeper questions of anthropology, metaphysics, and moral imagination. Real code-switching is not merely about switching registers. It involves inhabiting different moral grammars — entering worlds that carry distinct assumptions about meaning and responsibility.

Language always carries an anthropology beneath the surface. It is, of course, a vehicle for communication, but the moral grammar that underpins it establishes assumptions about what a human being is, how responsibility is assigned, and what speech itself is meant to do.

This was evident in the earlier example of ‘randomness’ within the Nigerian moral imagination, where providence subordinates chance. Such a worldview cultivates a mode of speech shaped by respect, implication, and hierarchy — one in which moral causality extends beyond materialism. 

I saw glimpses of this growing up in a Nigerian Christian household, where life was understood sacramentally. There was a reverence for God in every area of existence: success could never be interpreted as the product of individual strength alone, as that would place omnipotence in the hands of fallible human beings.

By contrast, my private school formation emphasised polished restraint and understatement. Confidence was to be quiet rather than declared.

Irony functioned as a marker of intelligence, while moral seriousness was often disguised as detachment.

At my local church, moral language took a different narrative form — centred on sin, grace, and transformation. Speech was oriented towards testimony and meaning, demanding a level of vulnerability that sat in noticeable tension with the emotional reserve cultivated in private school settings. Here, the self was understood as morally formed, not autonomous.

In liberal professional culture, the dominant frame is procedural neutrality. Emotion is bracketed from legitimacy, and moral claims — particularly those that gesture towards metaphysics — are carefully avoided. Competence is measured through empirically grounded analysis. Yet economic and procedural models struggle to capture human nature precisely because they tend to treat human beings as purely rational agents.

Then there is inner urban youth culture, where honour, respect, and reputation function as moral currency. Speech operates as defence and posturing, and authenticity is tied to survival rather than self-expression.

These are some of the moral worlds I have inhabited. Each requires not merely different words, but different ways of seeing.

Code-switching is often presented in popular culture as a form of deception or fragmentation: the idea that one is forced to suppress parts of the self because they would not be fully accepted in every context. Others see it as a negative by-product of an increasingly diverse and pluralistic society. From this perspective, fragmentation is contrasted with homogeneity, which is thought to offer rootedness, cohesion, and stability.

I want to suggest a different reading. Code-switching is better understood as a form of interpretive intelligence — and it is by no means new to humanity. The ancient world was far more comfortable with layered identities and with navigating multiple social and moral worlds simultaneously.

Consider the Apostle Paul, arguably the greatest evangelist in Christian history. He was ethnically Jewish, a Roman citizen by law, and fluent in Greek language and Hellenistic philosophy. These overlapping identities were not a source of confusion but of effectiveness, enabling him to move seamlessly between synagogues, civic forums, and philosophical debates across the Roman Empire.

Or take Augustine of Hippo: ethnically Berber, North African by geography, Roman by political inheritance, and Christian bishop by vocation. Despite — or perhaps because of — these layered identities, he is remembered as one of the foundational figures of Western civilisation.

What these figures possessed was not identity anxiety but moral perception. They understood how different worlds hear: what registers as wisdom or naivety, sincerity or threat, authority or folly.

Code-switching, for them, was not fragmentation but practical wisdom — a capacity to speak truth intelligibly across worlds without surrendering the substance of one’s convictions.

There is, however, a hidden cost to this work of translation — an emotional and moral burden that is rarely acknowledged. Constant self-translation can be wearying to the soul. There is a genuine risk of flattening one’s own convictions, since code-switching requires inhabiting another world along with its first principles.

There is also the temptation to retreat into procedural speech everywhere, precisely because it feels safer. Procedural language allows one to avoid moral exposure, to speak without fully standing anywhere. Yet this comes at a cost: it hollows out moral seriousness and blunts clarity.

This burden is seldom recognised in public discourse. Effective moral-cultural interpretation requires not only intelligence but temperament — patience, restraint, and a willingness to remain exposed across worlds. It is not surprising, then, that such figures are rare in public life.

Contemporary Britain is marked by increasing polarisation that now spills into nearly every corner of social life. There is a growing inability to inhabit another moral world charitably, alongside a confusion between disagreement and bad faith. Politics, culture, and civic life feel exhausting precisely because a shared understanding of the common good has eroded.

What we increasingly lack are translators — figures able to hold tension, navigate complexity, and engage disagreement with patience and grace. In their absence, enforcers have stepped in. Modern Britain has become more comfortable with the language of restriction than persuasion, reaching for authoritarian tools — bans, exclusions, regulatory controls — to assert conviction. The Online Safety Bill is one such example: an attempt to manage surface-level disorder while leaving the deeper moral and cultural fractures untouched.

Code-switching is not compromise but translation. It is an act of moral imagination, requiring attentiveness, restraint, and respect. The decline of such translators in public life, I would suggest, mirrors a deeper failure of moral formation: the virtues and ethical habits necessary for this work are no longer being cultivated.

In a genuinely plural society, moral life does not depend on flattening differences or enforcing uniformity. It depends on learning how to speak across them — patiently, truthfully, and without losing oneself.

This article was first published on Jide Ehizele’s Substack page, Southeast London Psalms. For the original article, see here. It is republished in Adamah Media with the author’s permission.

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