April Woodburn, Language Autobiography and response/video

Posted by Anonymous in English 2 - Block on

​I. Response

My language autobiography mainly uses my history as a person to show how my speech has changed over the years. I never realized how much impacted the way people spoke until i had to write this paper. Throughout my life, my speech was changing from the voice of a sheltered, one accent white girl to slowly becoming an open, adaptable, cultured voice that could speak to people with ease in many cases. 

II. Language Autobiography

    Before a little while ago I never really felt like an autobiography was needed for the way I spoke. I never really thought the way my speech was unique or different than anyone else. I always knew that other people spoke different than me, but I always spoke like my family, and I hadn't thought about the way others spoke unless it was being made fun of. I guess the best way to describe the way I speak is to show a bit of my history from start to now.
        I was born into an Irish family that just lived the standard “white-person” life. We just lived a way that was considered “normal” to most white people in a black neigborhood. We didn’t go to church, we didn’t usually go and spend money doing fun things, and, as the youngest child, I never went out because I wasn’t allowed to. The kids in the neighborhood moved in and out before I could get to know them because they were in section 8 housing. They all spoke different then me, saying phrases that changed pretty much every year, from “decent” to “drawlin’” to “triflin’.” I could never keep up, especially when I was never able to hang out with these people. I was that white girl they saw in school who got the good grades. With this kind of Isolation, I was subject to my parents’ Olde Philadelphia accents which had had also grown on my siblings, such as saying “wooder” instead of water.

This was my only linguistic influence until probably sixth or seventh grade, when heard mostly from not my parents but the people at my middle school, who were predominantly black. My seventh grade English teacher, a black woman named Mrs. Clarke, especially influenced me. She was the first black teacher I had ever had, and she was a very powerful speaker. She was the one who started to teach me how to speak to a crowd, so I began to have traces of her accent within mine. She also had a slight olde Philadelphia accent, being an older woman, but she had a classic turn of phrase that you would expect from most black women, not pronouncing her “er’s” and saying phrases like “Tore up from the Floor up”. By that time, I had been into anime and Japanese culture as well. I was very slowly learning Japanese, and used my new skills whenever I spoke for short periods of time.

By high school, I had learned more Japanese and was also learning Spanish. It quickly became a trend to use Spanish words when my classmates spoke to each other. I still often do that, usually to my Spanish 2 classmates. Plus, in the high school that I attend, I am far from being the only one interested in Japanese language, anime and culture. Some of my newer experiences have been the most influential to me. The more comfortable I get speaking around a person, the more I tend to match their speech patterns. So, I guess I don’t really have one language Identity, but many. I am an olde Philadelphian with new turn of phrase and Spanganese words sprinkled in.


III. Video

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