Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, charts the personal development of Khadra Shamy, a Muslim American girl struggling with what it means to be a Muslim American woman. As Khadra navigates her evolving world she must come to terms with her intersected identities: woman, Muslim, American, Arab, immigrant. This paper focuses specifically on the functions of Khadra’s code-switching between English and Arabic, as well as her shifts within English dialects, at crucial moments of self-development and self-definition within the novel. As a young woman, Khadra is challenged to repeatedly reinvent herself in response to the disparate communities in which she exists. Playing an astute linguistic game, she slides in and out of Arabic, Standard English, and heavily inflected Midwestern English depending on her interlocutor and how she wishes to portray herself. In moments of crisis, however, Khadra’s control over her various codes breaks down, and she often takes refuge in a language the other speakers won’t understand. She uses this defense mechanism most notably when her identity as a woman and a Muslim are in conflict: when her conservative Muslim fiancé suggests nine children, she spontaneously reasserts her agency in the situation by responding emphatically with a Midwestern “Nuh-uh!” that he doesn’t understand. This rhetorical move suddenly positions him as an outsider to what is taking place within the conversation, and leaves him no choice but to ask her what “nuh-uh” means if he wishes to reenter the dialogue. In scholarly examinations of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf—a novel that is rich with challenges to assumptions about Arab Americans and Muslim Americans—the subtleness of the language often goes overlooked. Using literary criticism paired with sociolinguistic theory to analyze moments of contested power, I suggest that Khadra practices a shrewd subversion of biased power dynamics, using language to reassert herself as an equal in the face of oppression.