The Gullah, aka Geechee, who come up in Book 3 Going South are real people. I had to limit conversations with them. They are one of the many peoples in America that need subtitles when they speak! (jk) In my life, I have experienced several of the subtitle-needing people.

When I first-hand experienced the Gullah, I haven’t a clue what she said. The conversation had to be translated for me by city African Americans. Even a black guy from New Jersey understood better than me. Northern African Americans are rooted in the South—their old country.

Code-switching refers to switching among dialects, styles or registers.

With characters like Chris Higgins, I can alter the grammar. This helps me get the message across of how an NC redneck speaks. The first experience I had with an NC redneck, I could not understand a word! He was older, so he didn’t know how to code-switch for me. The younger generations can code-switch.

When I lived in the UK, my ear tuned to what’s called Geordie. These are the people of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne area in the north of England. They had a unique way of speaking, which most Americans cannot decipher if their lives depended on it. Tuning to it, I discovered I could suddenly understood Elizabethan Shakespeare. I went to plays, and I laughed at the same time as everyone else. OMG, I got the jokes! I was tremendously proud of myself for that. I’ve sadly lost the ear since returning to the States many, many moons ago.

I wish I could have shown more of the Gullah in Book 3. But the word count was getting too high. Presumably, Chris could translate for the Northerners who’d not have a clue what the Gullah were saying. It’s a Southern thang. We Yankees wouldn’t understand. (Yankees being everyone not born in the South). 😊

I used to be able to code-switch between American English and British English. I still stumble over spellings to this very day, which editing and spell check programmes show me.

There are tons of articles that feature black Americans code-switching, but I wanted something more appropriate to Chris Higgins. I had heard North Carolina rednecks code-switch many times with my own ears. So, I am acutely aware they do this. Good news! I found an article from a redneck who code-switches.

I’m a Redneck and I Code Switch like Crazy

Ethan Patterson

As a white man, with all the vagueness, anonymity, and perceived normativity to which that entitles me, the stakes simply are not as high. I tend to regard police with suspicion, but not outright fear. I can only recall being obviously surveilled by retail workers once, at a Brooks Brothers in my teens, when the white-haired sales associate watched me like I was a cockroach that had crawled into the store. I do consciously make efforts to appear non-threatening to women (don’t walk too fast, look oblivious), but only twice in my life has a stranger obviously been frightened by my presence, and it was a man in both cases.

Nevertheless, I have my own scale […] It is my Redneck Scale. In public, I usually keep it at around a 2.0. Around my wife’s family, I’ll occasionally let it slide up to a 7 or so, for maybe ten seconds at a time. Sometimes around my parents, if I relax enough, it’ll hover at around an 8. It only inches higher when I’m cussing at NPR.

a big part of where my scale is at a given time has to do with how I speak. I learned to modify my speech so I wouldn’t sound “country” during college. Since moving from Tennessee to Ohio and now Colorado three years ago, my interactions with other white people have shown that my assimilation into BWSP (Basic White Speech Patterns) has been highly successful. I am routinely told, upon meeting someone and telling them where I’m from, “you don’t sound like you’re from Tennessee!” Instead of asking this person how they would like me to sound or informing them that I speak the way I do to avoid them stereotyping me, I usually just smile and nod.