Two of my good friends are originally from Mexico. They were born in the U.S., but their parents were born and raised in Mexico. My friends speak some Spanish at home, but usually they mix Spanish and English. One day I asked them why were they speaking in English and Spanish at the same time. One of them answered that they called it Spanglish and that was how they communicated all the time with their parents. I actually was present during a conversation between my friend and her parents. Although the mother could barely say a few words in English, and my friend only knew a little bit of Spanish, they could understand each other perfectly. When I was reading the part on page 4-5 of the Canagarajah reading where the mother communicates with her daughter while both of them are using Tamil and English, it reminded me of my friends. Canagarajah calls this a polyglot dialog (pg.5) and explains that it is enabled by receptive multilingualism, which is the principle that we can understand more languages than we speak. I think that my friends’ dialog with their parents in Spanglish can also be considered a polyglot dialog since both sides have a limited knowledge of one of the languages. While the parents can speak Spanish perfectly, their English is very limited and vice versa for the children. I think it is very interesting to see that many of the things that we are reading in class right now relate so much to our own personal experiences.
2 Comments
Paavali Hannikainen
1/30/2015 04:11:09 am
I also find it very fascinating to find so many parallels between what we discuss in class about multilingualism and how much of it I see around me constantly, especially at Emory because of our diverse student population. I learn all the time about different cultures identities from my peers, and I also think that all of the readings have given me a sense of understanding of how diverse languages and communication truly is. As a result, I feel a sense of power from all this knowledge and I'm excited to learn about how all of the topics from translingual orientation to Spanglish - like you discussed - can create this definition of communication around me.
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Brandon Amirian
2/1/2015 11:40:48 pm
Polyglot dialog is very common among immigrants and their U.S born children, such is the case in my house. My town has a very large Persian community that emigrated from Iran and in almost of all our households, this type of dialog is the norm. Even though my parents have been here for 40 years and can speak English, they still decide to talk in Farsi. I’ve always wondered why, and I think it’s because Farsi comes more natural to them and they feel more comfortable speaking it. Furthermore, I think they know at some point my siblings and I will stop speaking Farsi and they don’t want us to lose our rich language and heritage. So by speaking Farsi with us, it helps delay the seemingly inevitable effects of American assimilation.
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