The Language of the Speaker

“Are you hungry?” My brother asked me.

“Yeoa, a liottle.., do you have food foe me” I replied.

“Why are you talking like that” he said

“Like what, do I sound funny?” I said very confused

“Yes, you hang around those Hispanics and your picking it up” He chuckled at my funny sound speech.

“It will go away soon when I get home.” I said.  

A few summers ago, maybe in 2008, I went to Florida to visit my brother. I wasn’t excited because I didn’t have friends and barely knew anyone. So they enrolled me into a summer camp. In Miami there are a bunch of Hispanics and Spanish speaking people.  At camp, I made a few friends that were Dominican. Hanging around with them all day helped me picked up the same accent that they had. When my brother came to pick me up later on that day, I was talking to him and he was questioning where I had gotten an accent. I hadn’t noticed the accent because it sounded normal to me. Except I did notice that he sounded different from me. That was years ago, now when I got to visit him, he and his children have an accent. Looking back at that summer, I was thinking maybe if I had spent 2 years down there, would I have a permanent accent?

When speaking I can express myself. I'm not too pressed on what people think about they way I speak, so I speak saying the things I want to say. Sometimes I have to speak differently, when I'm at home, I have to slow down and annunciate my words. When I'm at school, I slur words and speak very fast. I am comfortable with speaking fast and not too clear. That sounds backwards, but slang is a huge part of vocabulary. I can speak on a level as someone who attends Howard University, although I wouldn't speak like that everyday of my life, that is not comfortable to me. I would rather speak the way I can understand and the way that shows who I am. I am a 15 years old female, who is from North Philadelphia. I also speak like I am a 15-year-old female living in the hardest part of Philly. I mean it’s who I am and where I'm from. “It revels the private identity and connects one with or divorces one from the larger public communal identity” James Baldwin in If Black Language isn’t a Language What is.  I feel like James Baldwin and I have something similar here. I speak the way I know how and what is comfortable to me. That is not so much of my private identity, but it is something that I would label my identity in general.

Sometimes when I listen to the way my friends and I speak to each other, I have to stop and think about when we learned to speak like that from, its because we hear is a lot. It’s also because we want to say some things that adults wouldn’t really understand, something like a code. Speaking out loud about something that should be said in front of certain people is ok when they don’t understand you. “…What resource left to them to create their own language? A language which they can connect back their identity to, one capable of communicating the relatives and values…” Glorvia Anzaldua in How to Tame a Wild Tongue. As teenagers we speak to each other a lot about things that don’t really matter, although we have to make it so that were talking about something important. There are many components that make up a teenagers language that not even I understand, but someone understand it.

People in the world speak many different things, but if you don’t understand it do you speak it? Of course not.  The deepest understanding of language is to speak what you know, and understand what you can, repeat what you learn.