Linkspam!

[oyceter]

• glass_icarus is looking for submissions to Potluck (by 1/21)!
  

  Potluck is intended to be a carnival for multicultural and intersectional discussions of food. There are no real limits on theme; however, the focus of the carnival is on thoughts and experiences around food through various topics that you might see around the social justice blogosphere, including but not limited to food discussions intersecting with disability, gender, sexuality, fat, animal rights and of course cultural and racial issues. We welcome you to share your recipes as well as your thoughts and experiences, but we ask that you do not submit posts with recipes only.



• chromatic_podfic is holding sign ups through 1/22! Even if you don't want to commit to reading and recording something, do sign up to be a pronunciation/language beta or give authorial permission for any of your eligible fic.


• oxoniensis is looking for help for Diversity in Porn Battle XI.


• Also, I realize this is completely late, but I wanted to give a shout out to dark_agenda and Chromatic Yuletide 2010 for making my experience of Yuletide as a reader so much more pleasant for the past two years. I suspect the presence of fic with codeswitching and non-English languages is very much thanks to the Dark Agenda push, and oh people, that seriously made my Yuletide.

Comments

[lnhammer]

fic with codeswitching

I think I know what you mean by this, but could you unpack that phrase?

Chromatic fic have indeed been quite welcome.

---L.

[oyceter]

Um. From what I gather, it can cover a lot of things. Frex, a black man might talk one way with friends, but if he's pulled over by the cops due to driving while black, you codeswitch and get super polite. Or when I talk to white Americans, I tend to use better grammar and vocab than I do with people from Taiwan, whereas with people from Taiwan, I start doing Chinglish and saying some things with a Chinese accent.

Basically, I think it can go from switching your tone of voice and general mode of speech to changing the language you're speaking in itself depending on the situation.

[lnhammer]

That's what I understood by the term.

I confess I hadn't noticed its particular absence in fiction. Though come to think of it, I see it more with gender performance than linguistic performance. Hmm.

And, hmm.

---L.

[oyceter]

I think I noticed, although I didn't have a name for it, because it came with realizing that there was a dearth of people like me, who speak more than one dialect or lingo or vernacular. Obviously this doesn't mean it doesn't exist in books, because I think a lot of cross-cultural authors do it (Nalo Hopkinson, Amy Tan, just off the top of my head), but I think the absence is a side effect or symptom of larger issues.

[lnhammer]

You may be onto something there.

Where I see it most, I think, is when a character is switching to street -- usually by someone who's from out of the street but needs information. There's also some of it in Hispanic-influenced fantasy, though there's precious little of that. (And of course, I'm most familiar with it in practice with English/Spanish switching, including various mixed modes. It was more or less how I spoke Spanish, back when I could still speak it with anything resembling fluency -- one code in the classroom and one on the soccer field.)

---L.