02.23.10

Switching Codes by Trina Hess http://www.yourshiningexample.com

Posted in Humor~Research at 1:27 pm by Dr. Trina Hess

http://yourshiningexample.com/wp-blog
I stumbled upon something interesting while I was researching German dialects. Something called the “basilect”. The basilect is part of the continuum of different ways to create a sentence. We move around here, choosing how we will communicate with others.
A basilect for one langauge describes 18 different ways of saying something in Guyanese English. One of those ways looks like this: aɪ geɪv hɪm wʌn
The term basilect was invented by William Stewart in 1965. Then in the 1970s Derek Bickerton used the word basilect to describe the process of code-switching. This is how we change our speech patterns and words to adapt to different people and situations.
We can think of humor as our basilect. We have various styles, levels of appropriateness, for each situation or listener we encounter. We can choose what we will say, and when. Because we can do this code-switching, we literally have control over our level of happiness.

Permalink