Since I was a kid, I have never had any doubts about my identity through languages. A language is a tool, not an inherent characteristic of a human being. One of my goals in life has always been to grow more proficient in the use of both languages and it’s clear that it is a lifetime engagement. Naturally, everyone has an ideal on how “cult, scholarly” language should sound. It happens in every language of the world or at least, in the majority where superiority is based on class, gender and race. If I had known what I know now of sociolinguistics, I wouldn’t have been so much vexed as I was when studying in Britain. Some made fun of my accent, but I was perplexed when they tried to imitate the Texas “twang” I’ve never had. I identify myself more with North-East accent because, as an army brat, my father was stationed a couple of years in Virginia. I started school there. I also lived in Georgia before, but in army bases a lot of people from different parts of the U.S. inter-mingle and through English was caught there by all of us, it was never with the southern “drawl” that characterizes it.
And this “ideal” language is not only portrayed in English. Puerto Rican Spanish is regarded as the worst and most backward style by the rest of Latin-Americans and the sad part of it is that we believe it! I think it must be our north to start fighting back such racist notions. Even the British lack a uniform accent because the people I met in Scotland, northeast England, Wales and London had a style of their own and I never saw it as a deficiency. Au contraire, I thought that the Oxford accent was an index of social class, just as satyrized by Bernard Shaw in “Pygmalion”.
World Englishes at UPRM
Since I was a kid, I have never had any doubts about my identity through languages. A language is a tool, not an inherent characteristic of a human being. One of my goals in life has always been to grow more proficient in the use of both languages and it’s clear that it is a lifetime engagement. Naturally, everyone has an ideal on how “cult, scholarly” language should sound. It happens in every language of the world or at least, in the majority where superiority is based on class, gender and race. If I had known what I know now of sociolinguistics, I wouldn’t have been so much vexed as I was when studying in Britain. Some made fun of my accent, but I was perplexed when they tried to imitate the Texas “twang” I’ve never had. I identify myself more with North-East accent because, as an army brat, my father was stationed a couple of years in Virginia. I started school there. I also lived in Georgia before, but in army bases a lot of people from different parts of the U.S. inter-mingle and through English was caught there by all of us, it was never with the southern “drawl” that characterizes it.
And this “ideal” language is not only portrayed in English. Puerto Rican Spanish is regarded as the worst and most backward style by the rest of Latin-Americans and the sad part of it is that we believe it! I think it must be our north to start fighting back such racist notions. Even the British lack a uniform accent because the people I met in Scotland, northeast England, Wales and London had a style of their own and I never saw it as a deficiency. Au contraire, I thought that the Oxford accent was an index of social class, just as satyrized by Bernard Shaw in “Pygmalion”.
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