Open Assignment #1 - Language in Culture and Society

Jacob and Sarah discuss the connection between language and culture in their podcast assignment. They share their own language backgrounds and experiences with different languages. They also talk about the impact of race on language learning, sharing instances of discrimination and stereotypes. They mention a study called the "forbidden experiment" where babies were not spoken to and the negative consequences it had. They also mention the linguistic nativism theory by Chomsky. Overall, they explore how language and culture are intertwined and the importance of understanding this connection. Hello, my name is Jacob. My name is Sarah. And this is our podcast open assignment for language and culture in society In this podcast Jacob and I are going to discuss that although language and culture are mistakenly understood to be separate through our discussions of race and language language learning as kids and How similar words appear across many different languages. We'll discover that language and culture are inherently intertwined We mentioned ideas by a garden flora and their respective readings language shock published in 1994 and bringing race in the second language acquisition Published in 2019 as well as ideas by the famous linguist Noah Chomsky As an introduction to ourselves and kind of our language background We'll first be going over just kind of our introductions to languages and how we've been exposed to different types of languages So firstly for me Jacob I am a fluent English speaker and both of my parents are fluent Spanish speakers as well as English I come from a Dominican household where Spanish was spoken But I never was taught Spanish directly and as a result I kind of know basically broken Spanish where I can understand certain things and carry a very small conversation But I wouldn't consider myself a fluent speaker. I Also like to say that I know a little bit of Japanese and some Japanese phrases and this is mainly through watching anime television with my brothers who we both grew up watching a lot of cartoons and And picking up on like the small catch phrases that we would hear from the TV So that's me in my experiences. My name is Sarah. I feel I've been had quite a bit of exposure in my familial background I Had to take five years of Spanish in high school, that was more like forced and not necessarily a choice and my dad is a fluent speaker of the language Urdu, which is in Pakistan and My mom she's able to hold a conversation in Urdu And she also speaks part a little bit of German and a little bit of French She herself is also fluent in English and so is my dad Whereas my grandparents on my dad's side my grandpa grew up in Indonesia in Sumatra and so he grew up speaking the language of the Ubu tribe, which is where they were ministering to as part of more of a religious background But he also speaks Hindi and Norwegian and Urdu so he has a real real knack and talent for languages and My grandma as far as I know she also speaks Hindi and she definitely speaks Norwegian she did grow up in Norway during the Nazi occupation and she's also fluent at English. So I Just feel like I have a lot of experiences Just being exposed to languages mostly In my immediate family, I would come down the stairs My dad would always be speaking in Urdu at all times of day and speaking really loudly on the phone Which I feel like is the classic dad behavior and When we would travel to Pakistan together, which is where my dad grew up I could always tell he was referring to me and mostly an activity of some sort that he would want to do by convincing others That his baby Would want to do it which would refer to daughter So I feel like even though I've only been to Pakistan for like a total of five weeks while I was there I felt I was also able to pick up on some language catch phrases, especially the word daughter in a more loving relational way So now we're going to start getting into our own individual Experiences with language and in specific we will now be talking about race and language Now I'm going to talk about my own individual experience with race and language I have a lot of memories from elementary school where I attended a school with a very high population of Spanish speakers and An elementary school teachers would literally interrupt conversations that the kids were having with each other in Spanish and just Looking back on it in a very abrupt Way tell them that like Spanish was for at home Like no Spanish allowed at school remember like English-speaking only Which I still remember feeling was like a little rude And then I remember ironically in the fifth grade that Teachers relied on a lot of the Spanish-speaking kids to teach a new incoming student English because he came into school only being able to speak Spanish and I actually met him again in high school and he was doing really really well, so definitely their work paid off, but I remember thinking that I was just like kind of a funny irony and I also remember feeling that it was weird that Kids who were white would be praised for like having knowledge of another language. I Remember repeating phrases from Uruzu, which is the language my dad was fluent in and They'd be just really really impressed even though I just know like a couple sentences if that Whereas kids who are coming in her look We're in fluent an entirely different language like it just was overlooked because they were Hispanic and this remind me of the excerpt from Flores and Rosa in their book bringing race in the second language acquisition and published in 2019 where They said in the case of the majority of low-income bilingual students from racialized backgrounds entering nursery school Their bilingualism is typically seen as a challenge that must be overcome That was on page 146 and on page 145. They also wrote These students are framed as a problem requiring a policy solution and those excerpts just remind me of my experiences In addition there was a game we had also played elementary school Where it was kind of like a get-to-know-you game But you would get bonus points if you could speak another language, but again Spanish didn't count which I thought was weird because a lot of kids at my school just simply like understood Spanish and Going off on another tangent I did have an experience. I went on a mission trip with my high school Going into my Sophomore year of high school during the summer and we went on a mission trip to Atlanta And we were serving and more of a low-income area which was Looking back on it primarily black where we're just playing on the playground with these really really young kids probably ages like four to eight and they would in their way of being mean to each other be calling each other like Whores and say like oh like F you when playing on the playground, which I remember being pretty shocked by seeing how young they were and this also plays into Flores and Rosa's book bringing race in a second language acquisition on page 147 where they wrote These differences are even more stark for racialized students whose language practices are more heavily policed than those of their white counterparts and how It is Inherently, I feel like language can be a racialized concept and Now moving on to some my own experiences with race and language Where I'm from which is North, New Jersey. It's a pretty diverse area and I would definitely say that language Related to Spanish Spanish speakers in the classroom were not typically shunned They were kind of just seen as another kid to this to the teacher. I would say they never were Exclusively pointed out or anything of the sort I do believe that this is due to a higher demographic makeup of Where I was from there's a lot of diversity with a different a lot of different languages and cultures that are intertwined with the area I Will also say that they were ESL classrooms that were filled with only Spanish-speaking kids and these were led by bilingual teachers who would try to help them navigate the English-speaking school and Oftentimes it did feel like these ESL kids in these classrooms were in a way behind like a fourth wall and and and kind of Separated from the rest of the school and I think a large part of this did have to do with Just the fact that there was a language barrier But it definitely did feel like at times as though it was almost a completely different and like unique group of kids that belonged to that ESL classroom and Similarly to what Sarah had said it was it's a very common theme I find even now where these students who are bilingual Are often chosen to help out the only English-speaking Adults communicate with only Spanish speakers. So it is a very interesting dynamic between Don't know too much Spanish, but also we need your help to navigate when we do come across Spanish speakers Next we are going to talk about learning language as kids so when I took a Bible class in middle school We referenced an experiment where babies were not spoken to It was presented to me that these babies were not like wanted. They were like in an orphanage and it was upon further research conducted in the 13th century and What was found was that? The experiment did not exactly go according to plan because the babies Yes, they were not spoken to but they also were not touched and What happened to them was that they all died? I'd which is really really horrible way that the experiment occurred hence why it's called the forbidden experiment and How it's presented to me was that the experiment conducted in order to see What language the babies would speak and the idea is that the language the babies would speak the language of God so theoretically perhaps that could be Hebrew and I feel like that does kind of Hurt the argument that Chomsky has where we have an innate ability Well, I guess that's more of an innate ability to like learn language rather like speak language But that does refer to his idea of linguistic nativism that we are born with the ability to learn languages So I really hope that the experiment is never conducted again but I thought it was a really really fascinating idea and Also, it's kind of a more personal experience Well somewhat my parents who spent over 30 years of their lives in Pakistan very Remote areas they recount stories of their time where in a traditional setting women who are just so busy with housework when their husbands and fathers and supporting partners Would go away to do work for months on end and sending money back home That they would literally tie babies to their beds So they wouldn't get in the way and the way these children or babies were tied down they would literally just be taken out to be changed and to be fed and They'd be very like kind of said that had a little curtain around it. So they'd be like in utter darkness and yet My parents described their fascination with how these kids were still able to learn language and just pick up on it and I Feel like this also goes into the idea of the Chomsky theory that we are hard hardwired to learn languages Even though those kids probably were not directly exposed to it Whereas when I went to Pakistan with my dad, we went to a girls school in Hunza where they were taught in English medium school and they're able to be fluent in Urdu, which is the national language English and Even though they were in a region with a language isolate called Burschowski and That through their exposure. I feel like it backed up Chomsky's idea that how When these girls and I guess also these babies eventually when they were exposed and interacted with other language Other languages they were able to develop the ability to communicate across Many spheres So for me, like I had mentioned I'd never fully learned Spanish as a kid and I often like to joke around with my parents and and talk about how they thought that I would just somehow magically end up Developing the full language without them ever actually taking the time apart to teach me And I think a large part that had to do with this is because both of my parents grew up in Spanish-speaking Households only but when I was born and raised by that time both of my parents had been speaking English So while they did speak Spanish to each other and their parents and sometimes to us occasionally as babies for the most part it was an English-speaking household and I think this offered a kind of escape from Spanish and from me and my brothers learning Spanish Which then resulted in ultimately us just never picking up the language to a fully developed level When we always had an English background to kind of resort to when we didn't want to speak Spanish There was a time in my early childhood where I felt very disconnected from Spanish and as a result I felt as though I should have been disconnected from my culture and my Hispanic background And it's not something that I struggled with for a while. And so as a result, I Told my dad that I really wanted to learn Spanish. I was maybe seven or eight at this time And actually had picked up a Spanish Bible But that did not last long. I've lost both my touch with religion and Spanish speaking at that time and I think It kind of just came from a loss of passion, honestly And as I grew older I kind of developed my own belief that I didn't have to speak Spanish to be intertwined with my culture and in general, I do think that there's a lot of like peer pressure and association simply by what you're labeled as Which I didn't really like the idea of too much. So I kind of have stepped away from that idea that You know to be Spanish or Hispanic I need to speak Spanish or to be Dominican that I need to to take part in certain aspects of the culture and whatnot and I've kind of tried to just develop my own identity as An individual person not so much rely on what my cultures Represents as so to move on to our next topic. We're going to be talking about similar words or cognates that are found in different Aspects of our languages and this is also taken a citation from agar published in 1994 language shock understanding the culture of conversation and this is taken from page 33 It starts with Jones work founded a line of thinking that continues into the present Language in this view is a source of items to compare with similar items from other languages The point of the comparison is to reconstruct Languages family tree to show how the siblings and cousins are related and to figure out what the ancestors might have looked like It goes on to say this is classic raw material for the historical linguists list of vocabulary items from universal human domain kingships Color and body parts the sample list makes us suspect what we know that the four languages are Related and that German and English look like one branch and French and Spanish look like another So this is something that is very relatable to me again having grown up as a very loose Spanish speaker with broken Spanish a lot of times that you know family functions are just around Spanish speakers in general a large part of what helps me pick up so what the conversation is about is these cognates or words that are similar in both English and Spanish and some of these that I Have these are just a few kind of small examples but the color red and rojo in Spanish and computer and computadora as Well as car and caro and again These are just a few words that agar mentions That are basically kind of feels like cousins of one another where if you know one You know the other one well enough and for me. It's been something that has helped me pick up on language And and understand what things are being said in Spanish The next idea I'm going to briefly touch upon is agar idea of linguistic relativity Which is the idea that the particular language we speak influences the way that we think about reality And I personally think this concept can be connected to my experience with the word love and Would do as my parents describe it to me there are about nine ways to describe love So it could be love between husband wife father and daughter mother and son the love that between siblings and I could go on but essentially there are different words for different types of relationships Whereas in English there's only really like one word for love And I feel that it's meaning can be used in a way that is not always intended So for example like love for your pizza love for your mom and love for your boyfriend Like are completely different relationships, and I feel that is why saying I love you can be really really complicated especially at the beginning of a romantic relationship Because one person might be meaning one thing and the other person taking it completely opposite And so an acre a car's book language shock understanding culture of conversation on page 68 He says language relativity says that your language is the familiar room The usual way of seeing the world and talking about it your language lays down Habitual patterns of seeing and thinking and talking when you learn its grammar and vocabulary, but it doesn't have to be a prison Yeah, and to briefly talk a little bit about my experience with this. It's a similar thing I had a coach in high school a track coach who I grew very close with throughout my years in high school and Oftentimes we would go to a track together to do a workout and again because if he was a Hispanic man. He's Puerto Rican And oftentimes he would call me Papa And it took me a minute to like understand that that was just kind of What you know you said and it and to me it meant dad, but to to a lot of Spanish speakers it's just the way to speak affectionately towards any man, and it could be you know a son or a Father figure or just any sort of important male in your life It's just another way to address them which was something that was new and very interesting to me And so in this podcast we use agar and floors reading to talk about language and topics related to language Such as how it's understood to be separate race and language learning languages kids And how we view similar words across different languages as well as how we view the world from different languages We want to thank you for listening Bye