Languages and Dialects in the US - Assignment Example

PART Assignment A The video I saw to dissect the different elements of speech was of a sermon by Pastor Joel Osteen’s which was about "The Power of ’I Am’". The video was very informational but the different elements of speech were beautifully crafted in this short video. From the beginning of the video everything about the place looked well organized and in an appropriate manner. There were many participants in the speech and it was not only attended by a particular gender or a race but it was open for public at large. The topic of the speech was basically ‘I Am’, as the speaker intended to motivate and wanted its participants to bring a positive element in their life. The goal of the speaker was to show how negatively we can use the word ‘I Am’ and delivered the message to use it positively. Pastor Joel Osteen kept the audience alive by putting a little smile on their face. He used many non-verbal skills to become the main and only focus of the audience. His gestures and facial expressions were eye catching and added more meaning to the message he wanted to deliver. Kinesics during a speech enhances the meaning of the objective and conveys the message more powerfully. In the speech ‘The Power of I Am’, the participants belonged to different race, culture, class and gender. As it was a sermon there was no racial discrimination and no class differences were seen in this video. It was a very large but well behaved and organised crowd with people from all walks of life were enjoying the speech. Men and women were together as the speech did not belong to a specific gender but was for the purpose of bringing positivity in the life of everyone. Assignment B The language dialect quiz is conducted to find out about the geographical point of origin of the people who have taken this quiz. The issues that can arise during a conversation because of different accents and different terminologies will be observed from this quiz. The provided link for the quiz was conducted and a big difference was noticed between the two participant with whom the quiz was held. The participants mostly had different terminologies for words and few terms used by two different individuals were not known to each other. They had different words for the same thing and were not aware of the existence of each other’s word. They had polar accents and it was proved from the very first question of the quiz as both the participants used different pronunciations for the words. From the result of this quiz it is analysed the people belonging to different regions have different accents and terminologies, such differences may cause issues during the conversation and can lead to improper delivery of message from that conversation. The linguistic variations based regionally in the U.S. can be criticized mostly because of various terminologies used by people belonging to various regions. Accents and pronunciations gather the interest of the people in the conversation and a person will be more interested in communicating with a person who uses similar terminologies (Paolo and Spears). PART 2 Answer 1 Patterns of speech vary from culture and genders; cultural pattern changes the theme of the speech in many ways. Within a country, if a person from one region is communicating to a person from another region there can be a difference in the communicating speech of both of them and may give rise to many grammatical and pronunciation style issues, it certainly affects the discussion. Change in gender changes the way of communication, as it has been researched that women use more question tags in their conversation as compared to men and men tend to interrupt more between a conversations than a woman. For instance women speak with higher pitch and use sentences like “He is coming, isn’t he?” Answer 2 Men use more modal tags than women and women tend to use more affective tags in the conversation than men. Hedge words are also used by women in their conversation more. In Modal tag speaker is uncertain and in affective tag the speaker is certain. For example women will say “she died of an apparent heart attack.” and men will say “she died of a heart attack.” Women will use “Open the gate for me could you?” and men will use the same sentence as “Open the gate for me.” Answer 3 In the debate between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, the gender difference is recognizable as women use more hand gestures than man which certainly Hilary Clinton was doing and Obama on the other hand was interrupting her as men tend to interrupt more during a conversation. Female political figures need to foster more gender neutrals in order to compete head to head with men. Answer 4 Canada have legislated two official languages ‘Canadian English’ and ‘ Canadian French’ as the number of speakers of both the languages are very high. Haiti also uses two official languages one is ‘Haitian Creole’ and the other is ‘French’, both these languages are legislated as Haiti’s official languages. More than one official language is unpopular in most of the countries; out of 193 countries around 178 countries prefer using only one official language. More than one official language is considered as a problem as it tends to split the society. Answer 5 Bilingual communities are those communities that use more than one language; these communities are formed by the immigrants and people in such community use both the languages. The features of language in bilingual communities are better understandings of heritage language education and bilingual education. There are many bilingual communities in America one of the most specific example can be is of a Puerto-Rican-American. Answer 6 Many native North American languages have already disappeared in the past. Kiliwa is a Native American language is highly extinct as it has steeply declined over the last half century. Kiliwa was spoken by Baja community in California and now it has only 52 speakers remaining. With only 52 speakers remaining it is definitely on the endangered list. The reason native languages are disappearing is because these languages are not being transmitted to the children or only few children are interested in learning such languages. Answer 7 Many cultures have had an impact on American culture but the culture with the most influence on American English is African American culture. Franco American or French English also has an impact on the American English. These languages have influenced the culture so much that they have taken a few words from such languages. Twerk is a new word added in the American English which is originated from black culture which is African American culture. The word Fauxhawk has also been added in the American English which is originated from Franco American culture. Answer 8 Peer groups play an important role to develop a communicative competence in a child. Peer group is basically a social group in which people of same age and gender meet; by meeting the people similar to themselves children develop a high communicative competence. Answer 9 Hierarchical organizations mean the flow of information from top to bottom or from a bigger position to a smaller position. An example of hierarchical organization maintained through language can be stated as the change in the structure of the sentence. Example of hierarchical organization can be change of a statement into a question form and another example is change of a sentence from affirmative to negative sentence. These are the examples of hierarchical organization maintained through language. Answer 10 Hierarchical organization maintained through language in the context of workplace can be explained with the example of Apple as all the decisions are taken from the top level management. Another example of workplace hierarchy is also from top to bottom, like from transmitting an order from CEO to COO to vice president to managers. PART 3 As people from different regions have different terminologies and different accents it makes it difficult for them to influence others by their speech. A person can be judged about his region from the way he communicates. Difference in dialect creates difficulties for people as in US linguistic hierarchies are often created. Linguistic hierarchies are made by differentiating among the people relating to their ethnicity, class and gender. Just by listening to a person’s speech one can generally find out about their gender, region and ethnicity (Baugh). As all the linguistic hierarchies comes in the mind of the people by listening, they start judging a person or they may find his/ her speech interesting or may lack interest in that speech. People have their own choice as they like some accent and they dislike certain accents, a person disliking something about the speech will be hard to convey the message. In order to be good at a place, language of that place should be learnt properly. By excelling in the language of a particular place a person can win hearts of many by conveying the positivity of his/ her message. No assumptions of linguistic hierarchies across lines of ethnicity and class can be made if a person is good in the language. Being bilingual helps a lot but a person should be perfect in both the languages. Many issues can be faced because of dialect distinction and to overcome such problems a person should listen carefully the accents and try to adopt and also must be needy to learn about the various terminologies which people of a particular region uses. The dialect of every region is different from the other and people find dialects prejudice if they are not similar with it. There are different dialect belonging to different regions of a country and all of the dialects are different with different gestures and terminologies. An African American woman from the Bronx has a different dialect and they follow their own customs, they have their own ways of gestures. African American stereotypes have their own accent which at times can be difficult to understand for an ordinary man who is not familiar with their dialect. A Puerto-Rican-American man from Harlem is a typical stereotype as the individual has its own typical way of pronouncing words. Their dialect is very different and their gestures are different as they belong to a different region. An Asian-American woman from Flushing may have a variety of dialects but they share a common language in writing. The most dominant dialect spoken by Asian American woman is Cantonese and Taishanese. An Italian American man from Staten Island has terminologies which are entirely different from the others. Many people are not able to understand the terms used by them and their dialect is different from the others. A Polish-American woman from Astoria tends to have a soft dialect, with a few words derived from German language. Polish have five different regional cultural associated dialects but are becoming increasingly less noticeable. An Irish-American man from Louisiana has a different dialect and their dialect is also called yat dialect as they say “where y’at?” for “where are you at?” This dialect is influenced from Louisiana French and Southern American English. A Norwegian-American woman from Minnesota can have different dialects and it all depends on the generation to which she belongs. They have many different dialects and are less identifiable as they have been living in America for many years. A Greek-American man from California has a different dialect and is very stereotype as most of the men went to America and settled there after the war. It gets difficult to adjust as there are a bit different from the original Americans and their gestures are also quite different. An example of bilingual code switching can be taken as a person using both the languages while talking to a peer group of same background. An example of bilingual code switching can be taken as ‘you can ask papi and mami to see if you can come down.” In this example Spanish words are used along with English. Dialect code switching is the change in dialect when changing the topic of the conversation or a tonal change in between a conversation. Example of Dialect code switching can be taken as a change from Standard English to African American English (Young, Barrett and Young-Rivera). A shift of accent during a conversation is the best example of dialect code switching. Works Cited Baugh, John. Beyond Ebonics : Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Paolo, M.D and A. K. Spears. Languages and Dialects in the U.S.: Focus on Diversity and Linguistics. London: Routledge, 2014. Young, V, A, et al. Other Peoples English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy. New York: Teachers College Press, 2013. Read More