Jamila Lyiscott's Essay 'Three Ways To Speak English'

“Three Ways to Speak English” is Jamila Lyiscott’s powerful spoken word essay given at TEDSalon NY2014. The “tri-tongued orator” explains that speaking three English dialects at home, school, and friends does not make her any less articulate or educated. She gives a voice explaining the complicated history and present-day identity that each language represents. Using emotional and logical tactics, she reminds the audience that the many dialects of English are as valid as the more standardized English used by the majority of the American population. Through her poem, she talks about racial identification and discrimination of an individual or group of people based on their speech, revealing the racial politics that shadow over compliments of articulacy. Behind the captivating speech is an accomplished activist fighting for racial justice since age fifteen. Lyiscott is a Postdoctoral Fellow at TC, Columbia University within the Institute for Urban and Minority Education and an adjunct professor at Long Island University. Her studies have focused on race, education, and social justice. Having faced racial discrimination and injustice living in a country of prejudice and …show more content…
It focuses on the same linguistic discrimination and prejudice of African American English and its speakers by talking about “marginalized dialects (like African American English) [which] do not have anything inherently ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ about them, standardized dialects don’t have anything inherently ‘good’ or ‘right’ about them.” Shousterman’s beliefs align closely to those of Jamila Lyiscott by supporting the belief that the way someone speaks English does not make them uneducated or ignorant. Lyiscott is not the only one “simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of this