Code-Switching as Linguistic Decolonization

Sor Juana wrote in Spanish, Nahuatl, Latin, and indigenous Mexican languages, shifting registers between academic theology and popular Spanish verse. She understood that language choice was never neutral—it connected her to different communities, carried different knowledge systems, and positioned her differently within power structures. Linguistic colonization attempts to make colonizers' languages the only legitimate vehicle for thought and knowledge, particularly by suppressing indigenous languages and dialects. Code-switching—moving between languages and registers—becomes a decolonial practice that maintains multiple knowledge systems simultaneously. In postcolonial contexts, this might mean speaking your heritage language at home while using the colonial language in academic spaces, or deliberately using non-standard English to resist the 'proper' language demands of dominant culture. Code-switching refuses the colonial demand to abandon your linguistic heritage for assimilation. It preserves connections to ancestral knowledge, signals community membership, and demonstrates that you are not fully captured by dominant systems. The practice acknowledges that you move between worlds linguistically, preserving your linguistic wholeness rather than fragmenting into 'appropriate' speech for different contexts.