Moving Beyond the Language Barrier

1433 Words3 Pages

Nobody’s born with the language they speak today. Everyone is born with a clean tongue that is transformed to make sounds and words that are native to their homeland and people they were raised by. Language can’t be described as a trait, like the color of your skin or the width of your shoulders. When society discriminates against individuals that speak differently, they are judging them based on how they were raised and how they were taught to speak, people don’t see them as just a person that didn’t have a choice of how they wanted to communicate, and conformed to fit into a puzzle of a whole area of people that sound the same way. I believe that people are molded by experience and adapt to the environment they were placed in. Life is based on survival and if you want to survive people have to absorb in their surroundings, including the way the human beings communicate with one another.

The vast varieties of different ways people move their tongue to form and produce words is endless. Language should just be a part of someone’s personality, as common as his or her shyness or boldness in behavior. Someone’s dialect, shouldn’t decipher who he or she is as a person, but should give a person as idea of who he or she is culturely and ethnically. In Hairston’s essay she expresses her strong belief in multiculturism in a classroom. I agree with her idea of everyone sharing their writing and comparing cultures and backgrounds. After you learn to speak, you learn to read then you learn to write. I think writing has a lot to do with the way you speak and if you speak different from your peers, the writing you produce will mimic that and give students another way to understand your ethnic background and culture. I responded to Hairst...

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...ussian and had a very different background, but it was one of the best decisions of my life, he’s really brought me a new perspective on life, such as everyone is very different and unique and you can really learn a lot about a person from the way that they speak. Not just their language, but also part of their belief system and what they stand for.

I have had many other experiences in my life with people that didn’t talk the same way as I do. Each encounter has brought me the knowledge of another person in this world that is very interesting and has a lot to offer. Every time now I stop and listen to what the person has to say, because I know there is something much more there then just a language. Once you get through the language barrier the skies the limit with how many people can become a part of your life and teach you things you would have never imagined.

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