Code-meshing considers all dialectal choices as inherently equal and doesn’t assume one is more “standard.” It attempts to cultivate spaces where there is no right or wrong use of language. Instead, it promotes the idea that language is complex and that its variations can coexist, in all forms, in any context. And in practice, code-meshing can result in extremely powerful and engaging speech and writing. We see it from creative and academic writers like James Kelman, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Gloria Anzaldùa, but also in less formal writing and speaking.

What is Code-Meshing? || Oregon State Guide to Grammar | | College of Liberal Arts | Oregon State University

In this definition post, I discuss the term “code-meshing,” which comes from Vershawn Young, an African-American scholar, and Suresh Canagarajah, a Sri Lankan scholar who teaches in the United States. In the term “code-meshing,” Young and Canagarajah provide possibly the best solution to the social and educational problems that arise when learning “standard” English is promoted as a gateway to success, and also when “other” languages/dialects are uncritically promoted as a counterbalance.

What is code-meshing? (with comparisons to code-switching and translanguaging) – annamend

Cam’s words recalled for me Kermit Campbell’s study of papers by “black inner city” male students who were natural code meshers, mixing “popular street slang” with academic discourse in their essays. Campbell’s students’ language habits didn’t surprise him, nor did Cam’s trouble me. Black vernacular discourse, after all, is an inseparable part of my native dialect. And Campbell’s argument that writing teachers should include an understanding of that dialect “in our writing pedagogies in [order to] affirm the social and cultural identities of many African American students” seems only logical and right to me (“Real Niggaz’s” 76).

Your Average Nigga on JSTOR

As an alternative to code switching, I argue, in my doctoral dissertation “Your Average Nigga: Language, Literacy, and the Rhetoric of Blackness,” that true linguistic and identity integration would mean allowing students to do what some linguists have called code mixing, to combine dialects, styles, and registers. Code mixing, or what I call code meshing, means allowing black students to mix a black English style with an academic register (much as I do in this essay). This technique not only links literacy to black culture, it meshes them together in a way that’s more in line with how people actually speak and write anyway. As linguist Ronald Wardhaugh writes, demonstrating “command of only one variety of language” is so unusual that doing so “would appear to be an extremely rare phenomenon. “Most speakers,” Wardhaugh argues, “command several varieties of any language they speak” (100). From this point of view, code meshing is more natural. Writing in a form other than code meshing creates artificiality, which might explain why some teachers can’t get some of their black students to write lucid, vivid academic prose in the same way those teachers observe those same students communicating with each other. (For examples of teachers not understanding how their teaching strategies, which mainly consists of code switching, promote black student failure in literacy classes, see A. Suresh Canagarajah’s “Safe Houses in the Contact Zone: Coping Strategies of African-American Students in the Academy” and Kay Harley and Sally Cannon’s “Failure: The Student’s or the Assessment’s?”) Those teachers, whether they are aware of it or not, are guilty of reinforcing sociolinguistic barriers that are impossible for students to cross. For in the name of academic policy and norms, they make black students extract the most expressive parts from their academic essays-the black talk that gives their papers verve and zest in hopes that what will remain is something they perceive to be academic discourse. This is why I argue for code meshing.

Your Average Nigga on JSTOR

Further Reading