While I agree with Columbia linguistics prof John McWhorter about many things, I remain deeply dubious about one of his primary assertions, that African American Vernacular English is a stand-alone language, a legitimate vernacular with rules similar to Spanish or French, or standard American English for that matter, that could end up in a rule book like White and Strunk’s “The Elements of Style.” Except it hasn’t.

The corollary to that is “code-switching,” where a person otherwise fully capable of speaking standard English will switch to a vernacular when speaking to an audience that either uses the vernacular or will appreciate the speaker’s use of it. When AOC did it, McWhorter explained why it was all good and normal.

To take McWhorter’s rationalization seriously, there is no reason why anyone shouldn’t be as entitled to weave back and forth from AAVE to standard English, just as they might from French to English or Spanish to English. If it’s a stand-alone language, then anyone capable of speaking it can do so.

Ocasio-Cortez’s critics seem to assume that since she is not black, her use of Black English must be some kind of act. This, however, is based on a major misreading of the linguistic reality of Latinos in America’s big cities. Since the 1950s, long-term and intense contact between black and Latino people in urban neighborhoods has created a large overlap between Black English and, for example, “Nuyorican” English, the dialect of New York’s Puerto Rican community. To a considerable extent, Latinos now speak “Ebonics” just as black people do, using the same slang and constructions, code-switching between it and standard English (and Spanish!) in the same ways.

The problem with this argument is that AOC wasn’t raised in the ‘hood, but in ‘burbs, far from the maddening crowds speaking “Ebonics,” as it used to be called. In other words, AOC had no greater legitimacy in switching to the vernacular than I would, other than having a Latina heritage. Is that close enough to explain it?

McWhorter now posits the same argument on behalf of Kamala Harris.

Twenty years ago I never thought I would hear the term “code-switching” used as widely as it now is beyond the halls of academe. Code-switching is perhaps best known in reference to alternating between different languages, such as English and Spanish. However, the same concept applies to different dialects of the same language, such as between a standard dialect and a colloquial one. But as glad as I am to see this, my heart sinks at the way people are mocking Vice President Kamala Harris for code-switching according to the audience she is speaking to. Barack Obama attracted criticism for doing the same thing back in the aughts; I hoped we had gotten past this.

Of course, Obama did this after completion of his second term in office, when speaking about young black men and poverty in Baltimore following the murder of Freddie Gray. But if it was fine for Obama, why not Harris?

Harris does this readily. In an address in Atlanta responding to “Lock him up” calls about Donald Trump, she said, “The courts are gonna handle that,” later working up the crowd by referring in pep-talk style to “Novem-buh.” In a speech in Michigan she mentioned that “We have fun doin’ hard work.” Some of her switching is simply to good old colloquial American — gonna, doin’ — but at other times, especially for heavily Black audiences like the one in Atlanta, she switches into Black English: “Novem-buh”; “foah” for “four.”

Harris didn’t grow up in the south as the ancestor of slaves. She was raised in Oakland, California, the daughter of Stanford University economics prof and a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It’s hard to imagine that letters were dropped from the end of words around the dinner table in the Harris household. She did attend Howard, the “Harvard” of HBCUs before law school at the University of California, San Francisco.

Then again, Oakland could be a tough town where black vernacular English was spoken.

More to the point, language is about reaching into another mind. It’s about connecting. Code-switching is one of the ways that humans use language to connect. Using the colloquial dialect of a language serves the same function as drinking or getting a mani-pedi together. It says, “We’re all the same.” It is especially natural, and common, when seeking connection about folksier things or summoning a note of cutting through the nonsense and getting to the heart of things in a “Let’s face it” way. This is why many of us readily say “Ain’t gonna happen” even if we aren’t given to saying “ain’t” regularly.

McWhorter is certainly right that language is about communicating, and if switching codes facilitates better communication, then it serves a useful purpose. That said, confusing colloquial speech (as opposed to formal) with code switching doesn’t help. Are expressions like “ain’t gonna happen” the same as “it be’s like that sometimes”? Yet, that doesn’t turn the use of code-switching into racial pandering or “faking” it.

It is in this light that we must evaluate an X post like “It’s pretty weird to change your accent on the fly depending on which audience you’re speaking to.” Wrong. This is like saying it’s pretty weird to dress according to what your plans for the day are.

The analogy to dressing “according to what your plans for the day are” is helpful to appreciate both the merit of McWhorter’s claim as well as its limitations. One wouldn’t wear a golf shirt to a black tie gala. But would it be similarly understandable for a candidate for president to wear pants hanging about one’s crotch for a daytime rally?