Chapter 1: Language Rights for Minorities and the Right to Code-Switch in the United States Workplace

Code-switching, or moving between one language and another in conversation (Myers-Scotton, 1990; Poplack, 2000), is often considered an inappropriate behavior by teachers and school officials who spend a lot of energy fighting it in the classroom and in other school settings (Palmer, 2009). Similarly, some employers make rules that prohibit code-switching and speaking foreign languages in general at work. This chapter reviews relevant neurocognitive, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic literature dealing with code-switching in a variety of settings. It attempts to provide a better understanding of linguistic evidence that can be used to establish a legal framework for the protection of linguistic minorities (Faingold, 2004a, 2006, 2007, 2012a, 2012b, 2014, 2015, 2016). The paper focuses on the use of Spanish/English code-switching by Hispanics in the workplace and studies rules that employers make to prohibit this behavior. It argues that code-switching is often not a matter of choice, but a natural behavior, that occurs unconsciously and unintentionally among bilinguals. Also, the chapter argues that code-switching is crucially connected to the national origin of the speakers and is of social and cultural importance to Hispanics in the United States (Haugen, 1956; Lipski, 1985; Zentella, 1997). The prohibition against speaking foreign languages at work—English-only policies—has been declared illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by some U.S. courts (Del Valle, 2003; Faingold, 2006, 2012b; Krahnke, Hoffman, & Krahnke, 2003).