Multilingual Identity and Code-Switching Selfhood

Sor Juana wrote in Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and other languages, navigating how different linguistic systems allowed or restricted her self-expression and intellectual claims. This tradition illuminates the multilingual reality of many people across cultures who live between language worlds, each with its own name-systems, grammar of identity, and possibilities for recognition. For diaspora communities, colonized populations, and multilingual speakers, identity formation involves negotiating which self emerges in which language, which name fits which context. Across cultures, multilingual people often experience identity as situational—they may be named and recognize themselves differently depending on linguistic context. This concept examines how identity is not unified but refracted through linguistic prisms, and how the right to speak in one's full linguistic repertoire becomes essential to authentic self-naming. Language choice itself becomes a political and personal act of identity construction.