Language in Society Personal Reflection Essay PDF

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Language in Society Personal Reflection Essay
Professor Grace Fay Cooper
Fall 2018...

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Christina Sayoc Professor Grace Fay Cooper Language in Society 24 October 2018 My Relationship with my Language Language in my everyday life is my relationship to my culture and heritage, the way that I use it reflects my own history. I grew up surrounded by family speaking English, broken English, English with a Filipino accent, “Taglish” as some will call the blend of English and Tagalog, and Tagalog alone. This was normal to me and what I was familiar with it until I began attending elementary school in Lower Merion School District where English was the dominant language and I quickly learned that my “normal” was not normal. I had an accent that made me stick out and it was ultimately deemed a “speech impediment” by my teachers and I was placed in a class that made me feel even more out of place. At such as young age, I realized how hard it was to hold onto my mother tongue in this country. Kids in my school saw being bilingual or multilingual as a game to have fun with. I was always asked how to say silly words and then mocked for saying them. The most challenging aspect was that I was in an elementary school with nearly five hundred students and I was the only full Filipino person aside from my sisters. When I entered grade school I began studying Spanish, none of it conversational until reaching middle school. It was all just basic terms that would never help me in actually holding a conversation with someone else. It took longer for me to grasp because I was learning it in a different way. With Tagalog and all the different branches of it that I speak, I learned it through language socialization but with Spanish, there was no integration. I would go to class for an hour and learn basic terms, listen to my teacher very slowly enunciate a question, and then answer it with an awful accent and pronunciation. But that was it, most of the class was spoken in English and outside of class, I did not have any opportunities to speak it at all. When I reached high school it became more conversational Spanish. We learned grammar, all the different tenses, understanding different accents, getting used the speed, and actually speaking with one another for an hour. Outside of class, I was able to speak with two of my older sisters who both are fluent and I was able to be more exposed to the language. All of that changed when I actually went to Spain to practice the language and learn more about the culture. Actually seeing the culture and being fully exposed was an eye-opener for me, Laura M. Ahearn explained the idea exceptionally well in her book Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology: “The general process of becoming socialized into the community is accomplished largely through linguistic interactions and is often accompanied by the learning of new words or usages” (Ahearn 81). Think about it, how often in a language class do you learn about slang that is commonly used, or nowadays, how to text like a native speaker. Learning a language is more than just vocabulary and grammar, it is also usages and applications, otherwise known as multimodality (34). Multimodality in a Filipino speech community can be illustrated in many different mediums. There is what is commonly heard which is speech but there are also the gestures that I have seen and used many times. As I child my parents and elders always instilled onto the children that pointing fingers is rude and you should never do it. Instead, if we needed to point at

something we would purse our lips towards it. I grew up so used to everyone pointing with their lips that it became natural to me. It usually meant “over there” or “give me that”, it was a gesture with so many different meanings. It all varied with its context and how the gesture was done. Sometimes it can be just asking your mom where a paper is and her point her lips over to a table which just means “it is over there”. It is interesting to me having learned two different languages in two different ways because you do not learn these things. No one ever teaches someone Tagalog and mentions that Filipino people often point with their lips and it is a common gesture with many different meanings. There are certain things that you pick up from living in the community. In the Filipino community, the family is one of the most important things. As I child I went to parties at my Grandma’s house all the time and at those parties everyone was family. Not always by blood but love. Usually, whenever I met someone new and they were older, they were introduced as a “Tita” or “Tito” which means “Aunt” or “Uncle”. Even if they were just a friend of my parents, they were treated like family. It is amazing because I was so familiar with this practice as a kid and nowadays I am introduced at “Tita Tina” and it is such a funny transition to me because I am on the flip side of what I was used to. These group interactions and parties at my Grandma’s house would be considered a speech community because they occurred frequently, there was a common language amongst everyone, and “language ideologies” were also similar (124). The parties stopped when my grandma passed away and it is definitely challenging to keep it up with the language. I find myself forgetting a lot of words and having to pull up a translator application to remember them and just practice. Dora Johnson, an employee at the Center of Applied Linguistics acknowledged in The Five-Minute Linguist that “Children rarely have the chance to continue learning heritage language at school, especially if it’s not French or Spanish but a less commonly taught language like, let’s say, Swedish or Tagalog” (Johnson 90). Nonetheless, it is important to me that I continue to practice and keep speaking my languages so that I can carry on my own culture. Language is imperative to society today being a connection to one's family and culture and also being apart of different communities. I am thankful for my languages and for all of those who have welcomed me into their family for simply sharing a common language.

References: Ahearn, L. (2016). Gesture, Sign Language, and Multimodality. In Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. (2nd ed.). (pp.33-51). Malden, MD. Wiley-

Blackwell. Ahearn, L. (2016). Language Acquisition and Socialization. In Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. (2nd ed.). (pp.69-86). Malden, MD. WileyBlackwell. Ahearn, L. (2016). Communities of Language Users. In Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. (2nd ed.). (pp.119-135). Malden, MD. Wiley-Blackwell. Johnson, J. (2006). What does it mean to be bilingual? In Rickerson, E.M., & Hilton, B. (Eds.). The 5-Minute Linguist: Bite Sized Essays on Language and Languages. (pp.88-92). (1st ed.). Bristol, CT. Equinox Publishing, Ltd....