Individual Experience of Working at a Prestigious Bank - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages I had a partial English education and could converse in English without difficulty. Although she had a thick African accent and a way of speaking, which is, at best called “cart before the horse,” the unabashed African made herself clearly understood. Other two Asians, coming from different parts of Asia, found it an uphill task to hold an ordinary conversation. But I could see that they were learning fast. People took some time to understand our accented and rather hurried way of speaking and this was, at times, a huge embarrassment. In frustration sometimes, we blamed it on the racism prevalent in the UK, although we knew that we were being unfair. African had an aggressive ‘back home’ accent and was unexpectedly comfortable with it. We had initial problems to understand the original British English, and had always been nervous if someone spoke to us directly. Slowly we started understanding the British way of speaking and that problem was partially left behind. It is fantastic that we know a common language, even though at varying degrees of fluency. “For many theorists within mainstream linguistics, the term discourse signifies a turning away from sentences as exemplars of usage in the abstract, that is examples of the way that language is structured as a system, to a concern with language in use.” Brown and Yule (1983, taken from Mills, 1997, p. 9).
Discourse across race and regions has many colors and shades. Our discourse that has remained formal even to this day with the British also shows the delicate nature of our relationship. It took only a few days for the rest of us to be informal. With formal conversation, very often one hits a brick wall. “What I have said is not ‘what I think’ but often what I wonder whether it couldn’t be thought,” said Foucault (1979d. 58) (Taken from Mills, 1997, p. 14). Language and discourse are crucial in cross-cultural interactions and mostly becomes the sole reason of hindrance in furthering a friendship.  ...Download file to see next pagesRead More