Blog Post #3 What is Your Heritage Language?

I feel that my heritage language is fairly similar to the way that I represent myself in positions where I have to be more professional. I think that the main difference depends on the audience I have. Sometimes, even in a professional setting, especially at my job as a peer Writing Tutor, I will find myself slipping into a more colloquial tone in order to better present myself to the student I’m working with. I feel particularly that I will use certain phrases or styles of colloquial language in certain groups of friends that emphasizes a certain part of my personality so that I am more easily approachable and relatable, whereas among other groups, I may feel much more comfortable speaking at a higher, more intellectually-driven level. I feel that while I don’t necessarily conflate intelligence and colloquial language, I do tailor my own language based on the amount I want to appear intelligent to a group of people. I believe that these patterns in my speech are dialectic. As the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCC) defines it, “A dialect is a variety of a language used by some definable group. Everyone has a personal version of language, an idiolect, which is unique, and closely related groups of idiolects make up dialects. By custom, some dialects are spoken. Others are written. Some are shared by the community at large. Others are confined to small communities, neighborhoods, or social groups” (CCC 5). In these varying social groups, I realize that I have completely different dialects. Even among close friends, I don’t talk to one person the same as I do another, but I still consider all of the ways in which I speak to be authentic to myself and my personality. 

As a white female student, I’ve never been othered by the ways in which I take agency of my language. When I speak informally in the classroom amongst my teachers and peers, no one ever bats an eye. Even most of the time when I speak more casually in the workplace, it is not seen as an issue. My whiteness affords me a privilege over my language that many people of color do not have. I have never been told that my English needs to be fixed. 

As a Writing Tutor, I have worked with numerous international students whose first language is not English. A number of them have explicitly stated that their professors have sent them to the writing center to “fix their English,” and when reviewing professor comments with the student, I will often see far more comments about the student’s lack of grasp of standard academic grammar rules than comments about the ideas presented in their work. Most of these students I’ve met with have clear ideas that fully support the arguments that they are making, but they are made to feel as though that they are not as competent or intelligent because they are still adapting to a new language they are being required to write in. I will often be asked “Is this good?” which feels to me like such an arbitrary question, because of course, the work is good, but this is often not what the student means. What they really want to know is “is this living up to my professor’s expectations?” which is a much more difficult question to navigate.