I’ve never really sat down and thought about my experiences related to multilingualism. Now that I have thought about it, I realize that I have constantly been surrounded by multilingualism. One of the first memories I have of multilingualism is from my cousins. My uncle married a French woman so their kids grew up leaning English and French. When they were toddlers there would switch back and forth between English and French. When my cousins would speak they would choose their words from whichever language was easier to pronounce. I remember hearing them say “I was eau”. Eau if French for water, and saying eau is easier to pronounce then water. In my Spanish class last semester we talked about something very similar but with Spanish and English: Spanglish. We read two poems that were written in Spanglish called “Bilingual Blues” by Gustavo Pérez Firmat and “Where you from?” By Gina Valdés. The theme of multilingual is evident from the use of Spanglish and the words of the poem. The authors talk about how the see themselves from 2 different places which they find pride in and confuses them at the same time. This idea is very foreign and interesting to me since I was raised only speaking English. Do any of you have any experience with the mixing of languages? If you do, how do you identify your self?
Erica FischerWriting about things happening in English 101 at Emory University. Archives
April 2015
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