My interviewee is a bilingual Swedish and English speaker, called Anna, that grew up in a Swedish household with a Swedish/British mother until she was twelve and then moved to America to live with her Canadian/American father. During this interview, I learned many things about Anna’s culture, there are aspects that point to the stigmas that come along with growing up two a multilingual household, the focus of this interview was linguistic stigmas, prestige differences, and linguistic identities.
There seemed to be a lot of stigma surrounding language in both households Anna grew up in. At one point in the interview, Anna claimed that her mother would apologize to her neighbors for her lack or a British accent after she had picked up an American accent when spending the summer with her father in America, Anna’s mother spoke to her children mostly in Swedish however English was always a part of Anna’s life because of her love of music, her true problem seemed to be trying to speak Swedish after the amount of time she spent in the US. Sadlik stated that an autistic student, named John, was unable to understand Chinese, which was his household primary language, because his family was told to speak to him only in English (Kremer-Sadlik, 2005: 1231). Like John, Anna who has claimed to be dyslexic also feels like her …show more content…
She also believes that she has lost a bit of her heritage after losing her accent. She agrees with Fish’s argument about learning English to fit into the status-quo (Fish, 2009: 3), but believes that American’s should travel more and not rely on English as their main form of
There seemed to be a lot of stigma surrounding language in both households Anna grew up in. At one point in the interview, Anna claimed that her mother would apologize to her neighbors for her lack or a British accent after she had picked up an American accent when spending the summer with her father in America, Anna’s mother spoke to her children mostly in Swedish however English was always a part of Anna’s life because of her love of music, her true problem seemed to be trying to speak Swedish after the amount of time she spent in the US. Sadlik stated that an autistic student, named John, was unable to understand Chinese, which was his household primary language, because his family was told to speak to him only in English (Kremer-Sadlik, 2005: 1231). Like John, Anna who has claimed to be dyslexic also feels like her …show more content…
She also believes that she has lost a bit of her heritage after losing her accent. She agrees with Fish’s argument about learning English to fit into the status-quo (Fish, 2009: 3), but believes that American’s should travel more and not rely on English as their main form of