Gloria talks about how her language is under-fire here in American culture, and sometimes even in spanish cultures. She notes that Chicanas are led to believe that they speak poor Spanish - and identifies this as Linguistic Terrorism. Have any of you ever felt that way about something so personal to you in regards to how you communicate? Maybe you have had a friend who uses sign language, and recognized that others thought he/she was inferior for not being able to speak proper english?
I had a German friend who tried to speak english, but was unable to formulate well articulated sentences. He was very capable of communicating how he felt, but did not sound all that smart - even though he was brilliant! I think many of my english aquiantences dissmissed some of his thoughts in conversation or would avoid talking to him about personal things because he did not speak well enough english. I think this might be closely related to Gloria's thoughts in reference to "Linguistic terrorism."
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3 comments:
I agree with you Will. I can actually closely relate to what Gloria is saying. I learned both English and Spanish at the same time, so as a 2 year old just learning to speak you can imagine how difficult it was trying to distinguish between the two languages. I often mixed my words and sentences resulting in what Gloria refers to as "Spanglish." I still have a hard time with sentence formation and structure. I mix words and translate things literally sometimes resulting in blank stares and questioning faces. It makes it difficult to communicate clearly.
On another note, I think this essay may have been very frustrating for non-spanish speakers to read. She used a lot of spanish phrases and never translated their meanings. Understanding her phrases made reading the essay much more enjoyable and humorous...it also really helped illustrate her point. Alot of her phrases were slang which made it easier to understand why they are "under fire" in some Spanish speaking countries.
I think I did miss something in a lot of the Spanish phrases. I could understand some of them from my two years of Spanish class, but I had no way to figure out what the slang terms were. This essay made me realize that I know even less of the Spanish language than I thought, and especially when she mentioned that some of the Spanish words I was taught aren't used in Chicano Spanish. I never would have thought about different variations of Spanish before reading this. I'm used to English dialects, but it never crossed my mind that other languages would vary from place to place, too.
I agree with Amanda, it was an eye opener to me of what I did not know. I took 2 years of spanish and I could not understand those sentences for the life of me for some reason. I also liked this essay though because it did do this. Society today is becoming more and more accomodating of the Spanish language and I think that in order to communicate in the future we are going to need to learn different variations and what not of Spanish. This kind of makes the reader want to learn their language and perfect it. Gloria Naylor did a very well job of making her point.
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