Eid Mubarak Everyone!

I’m wondering how many blog posts we’ll end up with if we continue to reflect our personal and analytical perspectives at this speedy rate. Although these blog posts are mandatory and have specific deadlines, I feel surprisingly relaxed when writing them, #nopressure. Not only have these blog posts helped me to readjust to the English language after a long break (summer), it has given me the opportunity to analyze more texts and improve upon my interpretative and rational writing skills. There is a certain security bound to this expressive method of inquiry, I feel more confident in the English Language and Literature course as it gives firm guidelines to its content. Anyhow, I shall get back to business and provide three paragraphs regarding three different texts that I have read, summarized, compared and contrasted over this short but enriching break.

The article “Yorkshire named top twang as Brummie brogue comes bottom” published by the Guardian, demonstrates dialectal superiority associated with one’s intelligence amongst British dialects, mainly focusing on Yorkshire Twang and the Brummie dialect in Birmingham. Research stated that “people who said nothing at all were regarded as more intelligent than those with a Brummie accent,” which encouraged Dr. Lance Workman (who led the research) to navigate perceived intelligence with regional stereotypes into a more impartial direction. He claimed that criminal offense is most likely to be correlated to Birmingham folk, which in turn is joined to a lack of sufficient education. The main purpose behind the study shows to be “to investigate regional stereotypes” and their prejudiced relation to “elite education.” As concerns to one of our own studies in class, this article refers to the topic identities, specifically devoted to the characteristics of master identities (national and regional origins). Language use and master identities are commonly bound together due to the perception of cultural provenance being closely related to language, or vice versa. The dialectal stereotypes within the article inform how people tend to associate one’s regional origin and dialect to physical, ethnical and mental prejudices.

In contrast to the first article, “You Say Up, I Say Yesterday”, writer Joan O’C. Hamilton specifically focuses the text on the research of cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky revealing explicit conclusions regarding language and its interconnected link to what the speaker of that language thinks, perceives and remembers about an event. Its study is very psychologically based, performing investigations that test the perception of a certain event with its corresponding usage of language to describe so. Boroditksy demonstrates her arguments through the use of several languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, Russian and English, to indicate how verb forms and intentional point of views regarding an event differentiate their cognitive perceptions. “She has shown that speakers of languages that use “non-agentive” verb forms – those that don’t indicate an animate actor – are less likely to remember who was involved in an accident (p. 464),” which supports Boroditsky’s argument regarding her study of language in connection to remembrance. Her passionate and extroverted learning in the fields of cognitive science exposes Boroditsky to go beyond the subject matter, as she takes her investigation to another level by introducing the relationship between linguistic features and cultural concepts including space, time and gender. Borditsky’s concepts strongly relate back to language rules studied in class and the role of language being shaped by social nature of human beings. Inquiring how a language is activates meaningful communication and using the importance of code-switching to demonstrate how the ‘breaking of a cup’ is communicated differently when translated.

The last text “Bilingual Mind: Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages” by Jeffrey Kluger, examines the impact of bilingual and multilingual minds through mental and physical studies. Throughout the text Kuger associates the positive aspects of being bilingual predominately, as Sean Lynch states “that these students [bilingual students] seemed to show a greater facility with skills that relied on interpreting symbolic representations, such as math or music.” Apart from the fact that the multilingualism provokes “profound effect on the brain, from improving your analytical skills, to enhancing your cognition, to protecting your brain from dementia later in life,” different studies claim to see a downside to multilingualism throughout the linguistic development of a child. They grow up with a smaller range of vocabulary in both their languages, causing incomprehensive cognition due to the constant switching of their languages “choosing the words they feel the children will have an easier time understanding or reproducing.” This consistent shift in languages is also known as code-switching, which links directly to our discussions in class about code-switching. Even though code-switching might cause unstable competence between two languages, it does achieve conceptual/linguistic gaps and establishes an identity different from on that can exist in either language.