Cross-Ciphering Modernity: The Social Representation of Code-Switching in The World between Us

Originally broadcast on Taiwan's Public Television Service (PTS) in 2019, The World between Us is the first Taiwanese television drama that attempts to create public understanding of how the country's legal and judicial system is influenced by the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). While The World between Us seems to imply that the world between the characters is created by a lack of knowledge about and understanding of legal and medical judgments, the plot, characters, and social events in the series point to another complexity that separated the world for Taiwanese people: the way in which language use in Taiwanese society combined with Western conceptions of knowledge to construct a new socioeconomic hierarchy. Thus, this essay examines how code-switching is used in the series to traverse and create social boundaries, analyzing how characters' code-switching reveals the social classifications produced by the practice of language and how languages signify and classify what belongs to the world of modern institutions, laws, and practices.