Monday, April 8, marked the launch of Code Switch, our new blog covering race, ethnicity and culture. To commemorate the blog's launch, all week we solicited stories about code-switching — the practice of shifting the languages you use or the way you express yourself in your conversations.
People sent us hundreds of stories illustrating the many ways we code-switch and the many reasons for doing it. Five of those motivations came up again and again in the stories we read:
1) Our lizard brains take over: The most common examples of code-switching were completely inadvertent; folks would slip into a different language or accent without even realizing it or intending to do it. One such story came from Lisa Okamoto, who told us she was born and raised in Los Angeles by two parents from Japan, a place she's visited all her life. This trip was particularly memorable (warning, profanity euphemisms ahead):
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