Living not at home

Code switching draws you in or keeps you out. Code switching is community and exclusion. Code switching is managing multiple identities and multiple fields of engagement. When people around you code switch they shift the borders, leaving you on new territory even though you thought you hadn't moved.  In linguistics code switching means alternating between two or more languages (or language varieties) in the course of a single conversation.  Code switching has a broader meaning too which includes all the non-linguistic aspects of communication: accent, gesture, body-language.  An example: in the rural hill town where we lived our elderly neighbour would switch mid-sentence from Portuguese to French. My foreignness, my prominent unbelonging, seemed to remind him of his years of graft in Versailles. And this, in turn, triggered his darting visits into the French language. Another example: the Netflix drugs thriller Rabo de Peixe  is set in the Azores and is, naturally...