Lingua franca

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan is a story about the different ways to speak English she used to communicate with different people throughout her childhood. I agree with her that our intelligence is judged by the way we speak. Tan described that the language she was taught in her family by her mother’s tongue has affected her English greatly. As a child, she often felt ashamed when she observed that her mother was disrespected by bank services, department stores and restaurants. Many formal English…

Excuse me, where is the elbow grease? When it comes to immigrating, simply learning the language is not enough. In order to assimilate into a new country, one must not only learn the language and culture, but also be capable of translating the culture back into language. So is the story of a young girl who immigrated with her family to the United States when she was just seven years old. In her essay “Hot Dogs and Wild Geese,” Firoozeh Dumas illustrates the challenges she and her family…

After interviewing a close friend of mine, and listening to the interviews from my peers in class, I am deeply overwhelmed. This is because their case is very similar to Richard Rodriguez’s reading, Hunger of Memory, the Education of Richard Rodriguez. Rodriguez talked about assimilating into the American culture, and adopting English as his first language. He described how his family stopped speaking Spanish to him, and continuously promotes English language in the house. Initially, I see no…

Probably the most experience I've had with intercultural communication are language barriers. Currently, I am deployed to the middle east. I recently had the opportunity to explore the area around me. I went sight-seeing with a group of friends to Jerash, also known as the Roman City of Jerasi. Just communicating with our tour guide was hard because although he spoke some English, some words and phrases he just couldn't understand, and same, he didn't know how to tell us details that he couldn't…

Is Text Messaging Diminishing the English Language? Everyone knows at least a little bit of text messaging talk; everyone has heard or seen it somewhere. In our society, phrases like “lol, omg, brb, yolo” are understood because the widely carried influence of the type of slang. There are many, many differences between text talk and proper English, but there are surprisingly comparisons between the two. Many believe that the text talk we all know and love is actually diminishing our proper…

In this conversation, the point of code switching is “which is” in P script. P explains to A that ATA means American Translator Association. However, he does not translate “which is” to Korean, and just speaks like an English speaker. The reason is that part is hard to translate to Korean. Korean is a postposition language, so they put the described words or sentence before the word, but English is a postposition language such as they can use “which is” to describe the word. Therefore, in this…

Many people look through books as a gateway to another life they could live in or if it can be relatable to themselves. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s book, In Other Words, it is a memoir of her life in the struggle of what she goes through in learning the Italian language. While there are a few times in the book where Lahiri sounds depressed and belittles herself when struggling to learn a new language, she often reminds the reader of why she learns and perseveres through that challenge to reach her goal.…

“Mother Tongue” talks about how a Chinese woman who was an immigrant and was limited, ignored, deny of her right, because she could not speak correct English. Amy Tan are daughter, talks about how she was aware of the various ways to use English language, and tries to use the correct grammar that she had learned during her school life, and from books when she was invited to a program to give a speech about her book to a group of people. During Tan’s speech, she notices that her mother was…

Out of all of the words in the English dictionary I choose rain, because I really like rain, but realized I knew nothing about the actual word, like whether it had any deeper meaning than just water from the sky or not. I found out a lot about the actual word in my research, which I looked through dictionaries and thesauruses, but took it further looking through the bible and Quran finding versus with the word and found proverbs and quotes that give the word a new meaning but that’s just the…

social connections, improve business, and give Americans a better perspective of the world. For years and years, english has been the lingua franca; but it hasn’t always been. Greek was the lingua franca during the Classical Period and Latin was the language of the Medieval Period. Lingua franca translates to “french language” because French was the lingua franca when the…