History plays a factor on how we speak

​History plays a factor on how we speak

If you want to know how my family talks, you should listen to my Uncle.

“Yo, was up Josh!” This is a typical greeting from him.

“Nottin chillin, chillin, you know just doin me.” I said, as I was getting up to shake his hand.

“Hey can I use your laptop for a minute? So I can download some music to my iphone…. Really quick.”

 “Yeah. It’s over there on the table.”

 “Yo nigga how you do this s***!!”

See, I grew up to a lot of people speaking to me mostly in slang and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Mostly everyone I have seen grew up with people talking to them in slang, so in a way you can say that slang shows up in everyone’s history. In mine, you would see that we use it like everyday. I was so use to people speaking in slang but as I got older I started to really listen to how I spoke with most of the elders I came across, with them I used less slang and started to speak more proper. Like instead of saying “wassup grandpa,” I said, “Hey grandpa how are you”. This will also show up when I talked with most of my teachers. I would use less slang. Sometimes I would even use none at all. There are some teachers I would talk to in slang but that’s only if they talk to me in slang. The way I respond to people all depends on how they talk to me. To me, it’s funny when I hear one of my cousins talk. He lives in New York and for some reason when he spoke he always had the word “son” at the end of ever sentence. He would say something like “hey wass up,” son or “yo son you better stop playin with me, or I’m gonna f*** you up son”. I always thought that was funny how no matter what he said he always had the word son in it. The reason why I think he used to say son a lot might be because he grew up in an environment where other people did it too. He might have picked it up from someone else too. If you think about it the way people speak can go back generations or even decades.

When people think of speaking proper most think of white people because back in the day, whites were educated. A quote from “Professor Willie Lynch’s Speech,” where he says “Gentlemen. I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing me here,” shows this. He says that speaking proper original comes from educated white folks back way back when. Slang must originate from slaves, if speaking proper is speaking like a white educated person. Then speaking in slang must mean speaking like a slave. We can see this in “Her Days As A Slave Famous Speech
by Mary Reynolds,” she talks about how her days as a slave were like. She says in one of her paragraphs “I was jus' bout big nough to start playin' with a broom to go bout sweepin' up and not even half doin' it when Dr. Kilpatrick sold me.” When she was speaking it sounds similar to the way most teens speak today.

The way people speak today all depend on how people used to speak decades ago. See today it might be a little bit different the way people speak but it all still comes from the roots of the past. If people in the past spoke differently, then that would have probably made a major difference on how we speak today. Also, in the essay that we reed in class called “If black English isn’t language then tell me what is?” by James Baldwin. It said, “The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purpose.” In this case this shows that since whites never educated blacks in the back days. They had to come up with another way to speak to each other, which creates the existence of the word “slang” because that’s how they used to speak to each other.

The history of a person’s life can really influence how they speak. Since people back in slavery times came up with a way to speak to each other, they still use it today. In personal experience, the people around me speak in slang. So in a way I adapted to my environment. Without history then people today will not have the same type of language we use today.