Sarah Scott-Nelson is a dedicated poet, avid traveler, and aspiring minimalist. She is a senior studying International Affairs and Peace and Conflict Studies and is passionate about people, cultures, communication, and social justice. After graduation, Sarah will take an experiential semester abroad in Tibet and Nepal to learn about the regions’ culture, language, and people, and she plans to return to Boston and pursue a career in the travel education industry.
Alyssa Penneris a junior with a double major in Spanish and Linguistics. She loves all things language, culture, and travel related. She has visited a number of different countries, including three trips to Mexico as part of a Gordon team, and plans to study abroad in Spain in the Spring. Alyssa is also one of the leaders of the Swing Dance Club and spends most of her free time either dancing or sewing.
The 2018 Marvel film, Black Panther, follows a pivotal moment in the history of a fictional nation called Wakanda. Wakanda is an African country that has never been colonized which allowed it to retain its natural resources and become the most technologically advanced country in the world. Primarily written for a Standard American English (SAE) speaking audience, and taking place partially in the United States, the film uses English as it is the main language. However, because it also is set in an uncolonized African country and follows characters from said country, the film uses the South African language of isiXhosa as the fictional language of Wakandan. The question, then, is when and why each of these languages is used throughout the film. This paper evaluates the film several times by first locating the scenes in which the characters code switch. Code-switching is the ways and times in which multilingual speakers switch between languages (known as codes). This paper explores patterns across those scenes that could be used to discover the intended motivations behind the switches. Through studying and transcribing the dialogue side-by-side, patterns could be found in anything from location, to the subject matter, to context. Ultimately, the study concluded from this research is that there are three main reasons for the switch from SAE to Wakandan: 1)use for familial terms; 2) ritual purposes; 3) and privacy.