The linguistic consciousness of the nation, formed by the potential of the language system, unites a certain group of people endowed with nominally the same ability of speech production. At the same time, language is often seen as a means of individuum formation since the way people speak often determines the way they perceive things and this perception may be different in diverse cultures. Thus, on the other hand, language acts as a socializing and unifying force that unites speakers into a language collective identity. On the other hand, language is one of the most reliable and effective means of forming a personal identity. This paper hypothesizes that language is instrumental in shaping personal and group identities in society and largely determines the result of their formation. Four readings are examined to support this idea: Tan’s “Mother tongue”, Anzaldua’s “How to tame a wild tongue”, Baldwin’s “If black language isn’t a language, then tell me, what is”, and Turner’s “Ni**as in English”. These works portray dividing and unifying functions of the language and illustrate how a person’s perception depends on the language he or she uses.
Language affects individual personality on two levels, impacting the way people perceive things and the way people are perceived through the language they use. Baldwin defines language as “the most vivid and crucial key to identity” in a sense that “it reveals the private identity” and is either in opposition or in unity to a collective one (Baldwin, para. 4). The private identity is affected through the perception of a person by the society and affects the way an individual relates to it. In this sense, language serves to form a perception of a person and a person.
The effect of language on an individual’s perception differs depending on the function it implements. If the language a person is accustomed to conveys a meaning different from its usual usage the language serves to divide and create barriers to understanding. I have a personal example of this from my childhood: my grandmother suffered from a mild form of color blindness, which made it difficult for her to differentiate color shades. She called pink and scarlet red and did not see any difference. As I often stayed with her as a child I, too, perceived these colors as one until later in life when my parents taught me the difference. This example serves to show how an individual perception is formed through the use of language. Thus, I had difficulty differentiating colors because I was taught to see them as one and my perception was formed this way. This function of language can also be traced in a collective identity; for example, the Japanese may have difficulty in differentiating between the present and the nearest future as there are no future tenses in the Japanese language.
The use of a language different from the one adopted in society can hurt a personal identity and lead to an individual’s marginalization. In her essay “Mother tongue,” Tan portrays how her mother’s ‘broken’ English led to the disregard of her needs by native speakers in the USA. Describing attitudes her family faced due to her mother’s “broken English”, Tan says, “People in department stores, at banks, and in restaurants did not take [mother] seriously, […] acted as if they did not hear her” (291). Individuals with poor command of English face all kinds of discrimination; the inability to express oneself in perfect English leads to social exclusion and rejection.
At a collective level, language serves to unify or divide depending on the dialect people use. In her work “How to tame a wild tongue”, Anzaldua portrays how people can be looked down on because of the language they use. The author speaks of Chicano Spanish which is a border tongue, a mix of English and Spanish (Anzaldua). The author shows how Americans try to educate people to speak differently from the way they are used to because of the language norms accepted in society. Society defines Chicanos as aggressors, destroying the language with every wrong word uttered, but Anzaldua stands up for these young cultures, referring to them as a natural result of evolution and proof that the language is alive and developing. If the society did not try to eradicate differences and instead incorporated this language into its culture, the unifying function of the language would have been brought about; instead, in her work, language serves to marginalize and divide.
The unifying function of the language in creating collective identity is depicted in “Ni**as in English” by Turner. The author portrays how she had to hide her wits and language abilities to be accepted into the group of her peers to be like everyone else (Turner). The notion that the author had to use the same language as everyone to be treated the same way shows that language can serve as a means of unification of people into groups depending on the way they speak.
Throughout the year language has served to divide and unify people depending on the historical context and governmental needs. Being instrumental in forming personal and collective identity, language can be the source of people’s pride or shame depending on how it is perceived by the society a person lives in. Instead of trying to eradicate accents, which, reflect the uniqueness of every people, governments should do more to admit language diversity and integrate different languages into the culture of the country.
Works Cited
Anzaldua, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”. In Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1979, pp. 53-64. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Baldwin, James. “If Black Language Isn’t A Language, Then Tell Me, What Is.” Rotten English, 1979, pp. 452-457.
Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” The World is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Culture and Its Contexts, 2003, p. 291.
Turner, Keisha. “Ni**as in English”, 2019.