Language and Identity

Hello guys, welcome back !

Throughout todays blog I am going to be talking about three texts that I  had been assigned to read over the Eid holiday. Im going to discuss how these three texts link to the content that had been covered in class over the last week or so.

The first article “Understanding how the brain speaks two languages” by Jeffrey Kluger talks and portrays the ideal of how the brain could speak more two or more languages which is a necessary skill. “Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did. It wasn’t just the 50,000 words you had to master to become fluent or the fact for the first six years of you life you learned three new words per day,” I found that this quotation seems interesting since Kluger here explains the extra work that bilingual speakers take on. Showing us that their are many benefits behind the ideal and concept of being a bilingual. Taking a look back at what I have learnt I discovered that by reading this article I could see how code switching relates to a persons aspect in maintaining and fulfilling a gap that they have due to several language barriers. After reading this article as a bilingual I believe that I now have a better insight towards learning a third language and being a monolingual person, according to Kluger “monolinguals need more time.. its a life long advantage for bilinguals” as here it refers to knowledge and other aspects in life. 

The second article published by The Guardian (online web page) talks about the levels of intelligence according to the British aspects and dialects. Throughout this article they talk about the different accents that are present in Britain and he specifically talks about the accents of Birmingham and Yorkshire. Throughout his article he highlights how stereotypes have a diminishing influence towards how one perceives intelligence through a dialect, he states that “people who said nothing at all were regarded as more intelligent than those with a Brummie accent”. Despite that their had been some reaches and test results that indicated that the people of Birmingham tend “to be very bright and friendly”. According to a survey that had been conducted and mentioned in the article their had been low ratings to Birmingham (5.6 out of 10) since they accosted them with criminal activity. While on the other hand Yorkshire tenants were portrayed as “wise,trustworthy,honest and straight forward”. Looking back at what i have learnt in class i could see a connection between both of the articles since as this article takes a look at the effect of language within a community, alongside with how hey are being viewed.

the third and final article published by Joan O,C. Hamilton’s “You say Up, I Say Yesterday” throughout this article the author portrays and states how languages accents differ “differ in myriad ways beyond simply having” looking at the title of the article we could sense that languages have different words with different meanings. this article mainly focuses on “language influences how its speakers focus their attention” as throughout this universe their are different cultures that provide different insights to ones language. Taking a look at this article i could conclude that it mainly underlines the ideal of how languages structure relates and links to ones personal culture and thoughts regarding a certain aspect, thus implying certain differences leading to certain barriers and limitations between different languages thus linking back to Boroditsky’s social experiments. This article has a huge link with the content that had been covered in class as in class we had covered certain aspects that had been discussed in this article. Throughout our class we had the chance to look up certain words thats had derived from certain cultures and how they differ in meaning due to a cultures approach of a certain word. Moreover, this article links with a task that we had done in class which was creating our own language, since we interpreted words we created and gave them a definition of our own.