Language And Social Identity

Throughout generations cultural traditions have been passed down, alongside these traditions came language. The language of ancestors, which soon began to be molded by the tongue of newer generations, was inherited. Though language is an everlasting changing part of the world, it is a representation of one’s identity, not only in a cultural way but from an environmental standpoint as well. One’s identity is revealed through language from an environmental point of view because the world that one is surrounded with can cause them to have their own definitions of words, an accent, etc. With newer generations, comes newer forms of languages.

The language I grew up with.” (Cohen, 2017, p. 416.) Looking at theses essays, it’s clear that language isn’t just a way to communicate it’s an important part of my identity and culture.

In her essay, Gloria Anzaldua claims that languages come with both personal identities and cultures. We are nothing whether we did not have our own languages. By telling the stories of her as a student such as when her teacher told her “if you want to be American, speak ‘American.’ If you do not like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.” (Anzaldua 206)

There are many different and unique aspects that form a person’s identity like social class, gender, religious beliefs, and occupation. Two crucial parts of one’s identity are language and race. The race is following your nationality’s cultures and how you represent them. Language is what we use to communicate on a daily basis. These two have a strong relationship because for most cultures language is an integral part. One person that reminds me of both is my great grandmother who has recently passed away. Her house would always smell like rice and beans and at the pace, she would talk to my great grandfather is too fast for me to even follow. I know that she came from Cuba and loved to show her culture, but others may not recognize her as

Who are we? What forms one's identity? Language is a important element of culture and culture is known to be crucial definer of one's identity. Language connects people to a certain identity and allows them to communicate their ideas and values to themselves and the world... In other words language is important as it allows people to express their thoughts as well as beliefs. Language does not necessarily define one's identity and identity does not define language, however it does affect it. Depending on how many languages people know, they are able to decide on what language they want to use in order to communicate with other communities according to their identities.One's identity defines and regulates the use of language and not the contrary.

Language is perhaps the most defining feature of human nature, and it is the human ability to communicate thoughts, feelings, and experiences that serves as the foundation for cultures across the world. Language is intrinsically tied to a sense of self—determining with whom we are able to interact with on a person-to-person basis, what knowledge and media we are able to consume, and linking us to past and present communities that share our language. Furthermore, language helps to construct communities and preserves origins, particularly in reference to place. For example, each of the six Iroquoian-speaking tribes of the Haudenosaunee has a unique name which evokes a knowledge about the defining characteristic of each tribe (Harris & Johnson

Language is used to convey a message as well as connect people to a particular culture or ethnicity he or she identifies with. People who share the same language share a bond and pass their history through language. In chapter one of The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom Joanne Kilgour Dowdy speak about growing up in Trinidad and her mother insisting on her speaking in the colonizer's language rather than her native Trinidadian language. Joanne Kilgour Dowdy felt as if her identity was being pushed to the side when she was forced to speak “Colonized English” when she was at school or around the social elite of her community, and felt ridiculed from her peers for speaking proper as if she was white or of the elite social class. Dowdy major concern was how to have the freedom to go back and forth from home, language to the public language without feeling judged from both sides of her

Our identity is a place upon many attributes of a human being. Whether the person is someone who goes on promoting themselves to the world or not, and it shows how people communicate to others around them. Language is one of the main components that unveils the person’s identity in their everyday life, and they are many different ways to approach a person’s language. Relating to the article of Yiyun Li, “To Speak is to Blunder,” she knows two languages that has its positive and negative outcomes in her life. I to relate to her understanding of language, but a different view of what language means to me.

Lera Boroditsky, a professor at Stanford, introduces readers to the question of whether a person’s language can shape their thought processes and views of the world around them through her research conducted at Stanford and MIT. Boroditsky explores further into the questioning about a language’s influence in her article “Lost in Translation”. Boroditsky proves to an audience of broad audience of scholars and people interested in cultural psychology that a person’s language not only influences the way a person thinks but can change a person’s perception of the world and media around them. Lera Boroditsky, through her use of rhetorical questions, comparisons, and addressing the counterargument achieves her purpose of proving that language does

Society has taught me what different words and symbols mean, affecting the way that I communicate on a daily

However, Amy points out, “But to me, my mother’s English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue” (Tan, 2014, p.317). Because Amy grew up grew up with her mother’s modified English, understanding it became second nature. Intimacy of language utilized by close family and friends makes sense to those belonging to the group, while outsiders remain disconnected To prevent confusion and language barriers, the method of delivering language depends on the situation and audience.

The Language Culture and Society programme provides us with strong theoretical and interdisciplinary foundation for the study of a range of educational practices across the human lifespan and in a range of theoretical and methodological perspective is brought to bear on studies that explore the nature of literate practices, democracy and civic engagement and participation in social life. The programme focuses on relationships between education school and the dynamics and changing structures of language, culture, and society. It examines connection between broader, social, cultural, linguistic, historical, aesthetic and political factors in education and the local context in which these issues take place.

Throughout the world there are many different cultures and just one aspect that gives culture its uniqueness is the dialect or language. Language is composed of many different symbols that everyone in a given culture understands, they have a universal meaning. Just because one culture has a symbol for understanding something, doesn 't mean that another culture will share that same meaning. Language for many cultures is what generated that culture, and what made it distinctly different from the others around it. Language can be in a form of art, music, or simply dialect.

In the article “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan cogitates about how her mother’s spoken English is compared to the Standard English language. Tan believes that language is not only a tool of communication, but also a sociological tool of measuring self worth. She’d always loved language, but never had she appeared expressive and rhetoric in front of her mother, due to the fact that her immigrant mother could not speak the Standard English language, but rather a “broken” English language. She discloses that between her mother, the outside world, and herself, only three languages exist: “broken” English (as her mother speaks to her), “simple” (as she speaks to her mother), and “watered down” (as she translates her mother’s tangled up broken English to

In the social life, language and society are two things that support each other. It is impossible if there is society without language and there is language without society, because language is a device to communicate one to another (Adam J.H, 1982; 3). There is the study to organize between language and the society that is called sociolinguistics.