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How does the way you speak and understand English affect your life? Have you experienced clashes between language and identity?

"One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language. Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth’, ‘order’, and ‘reality’ become established."

(Ashcroft et al. 1989: 7)

Posted - July 23, 2020
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Responses


  • 53506

    Didn’t you post this question about a month and a half ago, but without the quote?  I remember having answered you on it. I’m going to search the archives. Brb. 

    ~

      July 23, 2020 9:59 PM MDT
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  • 53506

     

      Ok, I just went to your profile, I perused the entire list of questions you’ve posted, and I stand corrected. It turns out that the question in question that I was sure I had already answered may have been this one:

    https://answermug.com/forums/topic/87316/how-does-your-beauty-or-self-perceived-lack-of-it-affect-the-w

     

      Now I’m wondering if the question I thought it was had actually been posted by someone else?  Meh, who knows?


    ~

      July 23, 2020 10:34 PM MDT
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  • 4624
    In an unrelated discussion on another question, you and I did discuss aspects of kids' attitudes to standard English versus African American English.
    It was what prompted my question, because I thought there could be quite a few others here who've had experiences of different kinds of English, creoles, patois, slang and so forth.
    I often see slang here and have to look it up.
    Given that being multi-lingual can be a great boon, I was hoping to see what kinds of different perspectives might arise.
    So far, not many seem interested. 
      July 26, 2020 3:36 AM MDT
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  • 53506

     

      Give them time, my friend. I myself plan to punch out a detailed answer to this one, and now that you’ve reminded me why the topic sounded familiar, I have a much better basis of understanding why. 

      Speaking of others’ answering your post(s), I’ve been wondering what is your impression of the litany of feedback you received on the series of questions you posted a week ago?
    ~

      July 26, 2020 6:35 AM MDT
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  • 53506

     

      Speaking of slang and of regionally-understood words and phrases, take a gander at this absolute gem as rendered by your fellow countryman:



    Slartiblast

    14347_0f85.png

    9971

    Usually the license plate. I can either find a word or invent one that uses all of the letters. Currently, however, it's the make. A Subaru Outback named "Ruby". The license plate has the letters WJR, and Jabberwock wasn't a good name for it. It doesn't like to start in brillig weather, its toves aren't particularly slithy and neither do its borogroves get mimsy.

     

    https://answermug.com/forums/topic/112174/if-you-were-to-name-your-car-or-your-truck-how-would-you-choose

     

    ~



      July 26, 2020 1:51 PM MDT
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  • 5451
    I think the way a person uses language identifies them more to other people than it does to themselves.  People are perfectly normal to themselves.  As far as English goes, imperialism comes into play because the thing I wondered growing up was "Why do people from England speak English, people from France speak French and people from Spain speak Spanish, but Americans don't speak American."  I live in South Dakota, and there is actually a Dakota language, so I wondered why we didn't speak that instead.  That would make more sense to a kid, but past imperialism answers that.  Something I thought was interesting about that is we speak English, but we don't actually write English thanks to some earlier religious imperialism.  We use the Latin alphabet instead of the actual English alphabet.

    The way we speak and understand English puts us into different groups.  It sometimes divides men from women.  Apparently my husband thinks woman aren't direct enough.  We had that discussion earlier today about a family member who had a problem with something somebody else wrote about her.  I thought we called him out on it, but apparently not, so I guess it needs to be plainly spelled out and highlighted with guys.

    The way we speak and understand English is a clue about nationality.  Canadians talk like people from the US, they usually use the same words as people from the US, but we know they're Canadian when they spell things the British way.  America and England have even bigger differences.  If you burn fags in England, you'd just get lung cancer.  If you do it in the USA, you're just plain evil.

    The way we speak and understand English is also a clue about the part of a country where a person comes from.  I'm pretty deaf to my own accent but most people from other states guess I'm either from Minnesota or Wisconsin.  I'm from northeastern South Dakota.  My husband says our local accent sounds like it's partially from Minnesota and partially from Wisconsin, but I guess that makes sense because the closest important city to me is named after a city in Wisconsin.  There are actually quite a few towns nearby named after cities in Wisconsin.  

    I know we also sometimes use different words.  Soda vs pop comes to mind.  It's always pop in South Dakota.  If you're going to Wisconsin, better pay attention to the part of the state you're visiting because it's pop in the western half of the state and soda in the eastern half of the state.  They'll definitely let you know about it if you get it wrong.  Also, something that'll never work is telling people from the northeast part of the USA that freeways and expressways are two different kinds of highways.  They're two different things in the central USA, but in the northeast, they call freeways expressways.  I have no idea what they call the kind of road that people in the central states call an expressway.  I've done battle with people from the northeast about that before. It's a losing battle.

    The way we speak and understand English is also a clue about age.  In my family, we call those grandma-isms, phrases only my grandmas and people in their age group use.  

    We even have epic battles over language in my own family, and they usually all start with one person.  It's my uncle Bob.  He's from Castle Rock, Colorado, but there's a town 130 miles or 210 km away, which was the flashpoint for some of our epic battles.  It's Buena Vista.  Uncle Bob demands that everything must be as Anglicized as possible, so he gets really upset if you call that place B(way)na Vista instead of B(you)na Vista.  He's still mad at my husband for making fun of his argument.  Pueblo's a city in Colorado that's 80 miles or 130 km away from Castle Rock.  My step brother-in-law's from there, so my husband told my uncle his step-brother was from P(you)blo.  Nobody from Colorado would ever say it that way, so my uncle got the point.  He wasn't happy about it, lol, but my cousins couldn't stop laughing about it.  They still call it P(you)blo now just to troll my uncle.






    This post was edited by Livvie at July 31, 2020 4:07 PM MDT
      July 27, 2020 1:46 AM MDT
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  • 53506
     
      Bravo, Livvie, bravissimo!  This is very well written!  The last part about your Uncle Bob and his steadfast insistence on pronouncing words the way he thinks they should be pronounced, regardless of accepted norms, reminds me of something my mother does. She’s extremely well versed in English, but to her detriment is not well traveled outside of the US at all, so she suffers from that narrow mindedness that some people have about words of other languages. She assigns English language rules to the pronunciation of foreign words, something I’ve since learned is like applying baseball rules to basketball. Case in point is the Spanish word taco. Unlike English, Spanish has very defined rules of pronunciation of vowels that do not vary or waver at all. The letter a in Spanish is always, always, always, always what we call in English the sift a as in at, father, pass, bat. My mother would order a tāco (tay-co).  Regardless of whether or not the person taking the order was English-only or Latino, they would almost always be confused and verify with her, “You mean taco?”  Not once in my life have I ever heard my mother say it correctly. She would adamantly repeat to the person, “No, I would like a tay-co.”  Not knowing Spanish nor any of its rules, and knowing her veracity in English, I had no basis for knowing she was incorrect, so from childhood, I always thought that my mother was the only person on the planet who knew how to say it correctly and that everyone else was wrong!  Once she even gave a ten-second dissertation the the poor child at the window on how and why the spelling of the word rendered the pronunciation the way that she thought it should be.
      Fast-forward to the middle school (junior high school) when a semester of foreign language was mandatory. German and Spanish were the only choices, and by that time, there was a large Latino population in our city and state. Spanish was by far the more popular choice, and since I had no desires or designs on speaking a foreign language anyway, I thought I’d just take the semester and be done with it, I chose Spanish. I learned that my mother’s way was wrong, to this day she still insists that because of the way it’s spelled, she is right.

      ~
      July 27, 2020 6:00 AM MDT
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  • 5451
    I took both Spanish and German in high school.  First I had Spanish with Señora Miller, then right away after that I had German with Frau Miller, lol.  I didn't even have to get up to change seats between those two classes.  

    Uncle Bob's insistence on Anglicizing every foreign word possible comes from his right-wing hyper-nationalism.  I don't know if it could even be called hyper-nationalism because politically, he's off in Weirdland somewhere.  He thinks our government should be replaced with a dictatorship that copies ancient Israel's civil laws from the Old Testmament, lol.

      July 27, 2020 6:15 PM MDT
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  • 551
    "I know we also sometimes use different words.  Soda vs pop comes to mind. "
    That's fascinating, Livvie - it reminds me of some of diversity of British English when talking about certain things. Take, for example, a large soft bread roll, perhaps a little larger than a hamburger bun, that we often use for making sandwiches (especially hot sandwiches). It can be called a bap, a teacake, a barmcake, a batch or a breadcake depending on what town or region you are in. And we have many different words for a passageway between buildings in an urban area - in parts of North-East England and Scotland it's a vennel, in Sheffield it's a jennel, in other parts of northern England it's a ginnel, in Edinburgh a wynd, and when I was growing up in Stoke-on-Trent it was an "entry" (why not an "exit"?). Oh, and in Manchester, trousers are called "pants" as they are in American English - everywhere else, "pants" means underwear, unless it has an adjective attached  - cargo pants, jogging pants, etc. 
      July 31, 2020 4:21 PM MDT
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