Inconsistency - Taahir Henry

Inconsistency

Taahir Henry

Gold English

January 13 2011

“I thought you was dumb at first.” said my friend

“Why you say dat?” I asked.

“Cuz, you just big and you talk like everybody else.”

“So everybody dumb?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Ard, but you still don’t make any sense.”

“Its cuz of the fact that you just sound kind of slow when you talk.”

“How?”

“Cuz, you just sound slow sometimes.”

“Maybe I’m thinking about what I’m gonn say.”

“Or you just sound dumb.”

“Ard, but then why do you think I’m smart.”

“Cuz the way you talk to us and the way you talk to teachers not the    same”

“Huh?”

“When you talk to us you don’t talk the same, like when you talk to a teacher you use the whole word and your voice change”

“Ard”.  I didn’t really know what he meant because I never heard anything like that before.  How could I sound dumb one minute, and then sound intelligent the next?

 I noticed that I actually did change my tone and fully pronounced my words when I spoke to teachers.  He was right, but how could I have never recognized this myself?  I started to notice that I was not the only one who changed their voice and speech based on who they were talking to.  My mother, aunt, and grandmother did the same thing.  I must have picked up the habit from hearing them.  They used a more relaxed natural tone when they were talking to someone that they knew personally.  The opposite occurred when they were trying to be professional.   I first noticed this when my mom would call the bank to get account information or if she called to get her car serviced.   It only happened in situations where they wanted to be professional and taken seriously.  Being taken seriously is important if you need to get things done.

I would have been mocked by my peers for being proper, but would have been perceived as incompetent by adults and teachers for using slang.  “Code switching” is something that made things a lot more convenient, because I could choose the appropriate time to speak a certain way.  The way I spoke was as a result of growing up around people who usually didn’t use proper English, except in situations where they thought it was necessary.   I sort of had an at home voice and a voice that I used for those I didn’t know so well.  Richard Rodriguez said, “They regarded the people at work, the faces in crowds, as very distant from us they were the others, los gringos.”  The people in the essay saw themselves as being completely different from “Los Gringos” because they spoke a different language, which caused them to feel separate.  This is similar to how the members of my family and I felt about people who spoke differently than we did.  I know this is true because my family tends to use “business like” voices when they are at work and they would speak normally anywhere else.  Language can show who you are, and your level of education, which is important.