The Importance Of English And Spanish Language

Imagine being in the third grade again. You’re eight years old and it’s your first day of school. Anxiety and nervousness is overwhelming you. Not because of new teachers, classes, or friends. Not because you’re in a new hallway and are lost. However, when talking to some friends of another race in Spanish, an adult had mustered up the courage to tell you “You’re not Hispanic, you’re black, let us keep our language to ourselves.” That was the moment that changed how you saw yourself forever. Though it sounds quite harsh, this was my experience. From a very young age, it was always pounded into my mind that “you are how you speak” and I was encouraged to always put my best vocabulary on display. This meant doing away with the slang and colloquialisms

We were constantly taught that being bilingual would offer us so many opportunities and that it was important to master multiple languages. I was well versed, and though I felt more comfortable speaking English, my Spanish was especially fluent. I spoke Spanish both at home and in school, and eventually, this became problematic. In my second year of learning Spanish, there came a point where the two languages meshed together, and it became increasingly difficult to know which one to speak in everyday situations. For example, I would begin greeting family members who didn’t know Spanish with “Buenos Dias” which meant good morning. I would also ask my mother and father for things in Spanish and they would have no idea what they were. In my home, where all of my siblings spoke solely English, I felt that I wasn’t connecting with them because of my lack of knowledge and awareness on when to speak what language. At one point in my elementary school education, I was so confused about being a bilingual student I had an identity crisis when confronted by a Hispanic adult who told me that I shouldn’t be allowed to speak Spanish because I wasn’t Hispanic, and that I was “stealing their culture.” I began to question who I was and even asked my parents if I could unenroll myself from the program. It wasn’t until years later

Attending school in a primarily white environment for the duration of elementary school, one thing that was constantly reinforced was “you are how you speak.” To a majority of my teachers, there was no such thing as variations of English and they stuck to a strict form of language what many of them referred to as “proper English” and what I know today to be standard American English. Typical slang terms and colloquialisms I used at home were generally looked down upon at school. In and out of the classroom, I wasn’t allowed to use words such as “ y’all,” “finna,” or “can’t” and was immediately told that these words made me sound uneducated. It caused a conflict to arise in me. Those were the words my entire family used at home, from my grandparents, to my parents, right down to my cousins; were they uneducated? My teacher on several occasions told me that if I used words that weren’t seen as “ real English” I would be seen as unintelligent. This basically insinuated that the slang, which I know now to be components of African American Vernacular, used by everyone around me wasn’t valid enough. She constantly condemned black students for using words that were apart of Ebonics and only promoted and allowed works from prominent white male authors. This is a great example of misidentification because her sole reason for associating a