Gloria Anzaldúa Bilingualism

America is considered a melting pot of both cultural and ethnic identities; accepting the diverse languages and religions of the world. In the argumentative essay about bilingualism “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” in the book Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing, Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity - I am language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (172). Anzaldúa believes that her ethnicity is the very thing that makes her who she is, her language. Therefore, by insulting her language, you are insulting her. Her identity is “twin skin” with how the she speaks. Linguistic identity is the ability for a person …show more content…
A language that is learned is like gaining an advantage and the more languages you have and diverse you become the more of an asset you would be for the world because language is power. This is because you would be able to connect to people who speak the same language. Anzaldúa wrote this because she wanted to show that there were more dialects of Spanish than a few. There are so many dialects because people need to be able to connect to “home” and since there are so many Spanish speaking countries, their language is very heterogeneous. She shows that her linguistic identity is complex. Therefore, since her linguistic identity is twin skin with her ethnic identity, her ethnic identity is also very complex. People usually submerge themselves with other people of the same culture/ language to hide from the cruel criticism of the world. But many do not know that there are also barriers within these closely related communities that results in different dialects leading one community to not understand the next. Whenever someone insults someone because of the way they speak, they are hurting their self-esteem and ultimately discouraging the person to continue to speak their native