Pitt professors, researchers explain the role of code-switching in Harris’s presidential campaign

In what is already a close and contentious 2024 presidential race, clips of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris have circulated on social media in which the vice president seems to change her accent in certain contexts. 

“It’s a double-edged sword for members of minority communities,” Pitt social psychologist Joel Forestier said. “I have to imagine that this is a story that the Harris campaign would like to go away, because when people are made aware of it, they’re going to react negatively to that.”

This act of changing accents, known as code-switching, is the process of alternating between multiple language variants during a conversation. While it can happen both consciously and unconsciously, experts explained that when used in political rhetoric, it can be impactful on a politician’s campaign.

Forestier, who has studied how members of marginalized groups navigate intergroup contexts, described code-switching as the “idea that people can tailor their verbal self-presentation.”

“It’s not only racial minorities who engage in code-switching, but that’s certainly the sort of a space where we talk about it the most,” Forestier said. 

In a political setting, Forestier said code-switching is used for and against candidates. In recent social media trends, video snippets negatively depict compilations of Harris’ many “accents.” Forestier said Harris’ identity as a politician of color likely plays a large role in her code-switching. 

“If [Harris] made a different choice, if she always communicated in the way that her communities communicated within themselves when she was growing up, then she’d probably get a separate type of backlash from that, right?” Forestier said.

Forestier, along with Don Holmes, an assistant professor of English at Pitt, agreed that while this process does happen naturally, Harris uses code-switching as a mechanism to come off as relatable and adhere to the familiarity of the audiences she is speaking in front of. Holmes said he feels it is a contextually necessary process for Harris to be authentic and “prepared” as a politician. 

“It’s about her audience and about what discourse she’s engaging in and how she is just basically being her true self,” Holmes said. “There is a performance when it comes to her being a politician.”

Forestier said people use code-switching for many reasons, but the basics of the psychological phenomenon stem from humans’ desires to fit in and to “come off as friendlier” and “better liked.”

“[People code-switch] to ensure that they can be heard, listened to, respected by other people, to conform to the norms of the situation,” Forestier said. 

However, Forestier said the negative reactions to Harris’s code-switching likely come from a feeling of being misled. 

“People don’t like to feel as though they’ve been misled in any way, and people have these very strong, negative, moralizing reactions to that, so they’ll really perceive you as immoral. They’ll really perceive you as unsociable,” Forestier said.

Sreyashi Mukherjee, a teaching assistant professor at the department of communication whose work is focused on intercultural linguistics and how language persuades technically, is trying to understand how audiences could feel certain ways when experiencing this action that could potentially influence a tight election.

Mukherjee said she believes Harris’ tendency to use code-switching stems from efforts to build relationships with demographics of voters.

“There’s a huge play of identity politics, and if one really wants to get into it, I think that it disturbs a lot of people,” Mukherjee said. “Because she’s starting to annoy people in some ways, being that, you know, they feel tokenized a little bit.” 

“So she has to embrace the kind of charges that the rights make against her, and in embracing that, she has to kind of perform that kind of code-switching,” Mukherjee said. “And I think, if anything, if anything, is true of her, I think it is that it is a performance, and that’s not a bad thing at all. People perform all the time. And so her performance of code-switching is probably both conscious and subconscious. The need for Harris to code-switch in a political setting is beneficial as well, however.”

With policy implemented in her role as vice president, Mukherjee said she believes Harris’ code-switching is a way for her to reconnect with demographic audiences that hold a lot of power in their vote. 

“It comes from the election cycle prior to this,” Mukherjee said.  “I think her practice of code-switching is her trying really hard to embed herself within the people who need to vote for her and hopefully understand her.”