James Baldwin On Language Essay

Early on in my childhood, I was taught that the proper way to respond to an adult when they were speaking to me was to use the words “ma’am” and “sir”. If I did not do so and in my mother’s presence, she would get upset with me and tell me that it was disrespectful and rude. By growing up and being raised in the South, I have learned that this is true within multiple other households and not strictly my own. Seeing that this was a cultural display of respect and politeness portrays how these kinds of mannerisms are said to be the qualifier for whether you could be considered as a properly raised and polite individual. James Baldwin, an African American writer, declares the importance and necessity of proper language; however, he does not stop there. He goes on to say that language possesses a significant power to reveal the private identity of oneself as well as their backgrounds. Baldwin is correct in his statement that language is a “key to identity” and that words act as a bridge to knowing someone’s private life by solely speaking to someone for a short time frame. In everyday life, language is used to identify a person’s social, personal, and political standings, whether the details are implied, or directly stated. Social interactions on every level of a day-to-day basis support the ideas that variations of language among

Being from the South, I know multiple individuals that have an incredibly strong southern accent, but are some of the most intelligent people I have met in my life. Stereotyping is a false statement that plays a role in the outlook of a society or region as a whole; for example, not all people in the South have an outhouse in their backyard as their primary resource for plumbing. Language does not always act as a “key to identity”, but most of the time, will decipher whether someone will be socially accepted or