Language & Literacy as a Bilingual New Yorker

Language is a huge part of us as people, we speak it, write it, read it. I mean, without language how would we communicate? But that is the basis of how language affects society as a whole, as individuals we use language differently and find different levels of importance within it. I personally find language to be fairly important as a bilingual person that also utilizes codeswitching. 

A memory of my personal use of language would be speaking and writing in school. Growing up in a Spanish speaking household, school was the only place I really spoke English. I was taught that I had to speak proper English with administrators, teachers, and be sure to write properly whether in an email or my handwriting. But around my friends it did not matter how I spoke, it didn’t have to be “proper”, it just had to be English. 

I didn’t grow up as a typical bilingual kid. Neither of my parents spoke good English, so they both only spoke to me in Spanish, and I would spend half of the year living in the Dominican Republic until about the age of 4. The six months a year I spent in the United States I would be placed in bilingual pre schools, though most of my teachers would also only speak to me in Spanish since that was my primary language at home. I didn’t properly learn English until I entered Kindergarten at the age of 5. I’ve gone to charter school my whole life, where they had always been very strict with the way we spoke and presented ourselves, setting us up from a very young age to be “proper professionals”, from the uniform, to the shoes, even the socks and the way we sat. Due to my language barrier and broken English, I was placed in speech therapy. I worked on my pronunciations and basic grammar, and then had to implement what I learned in speech therapy into my actual work. It had to be implemented just as I was taught, “proper” and “professionally”. Hence my intro into codeswitching. 

When I got to a point where I was speaking English fluently, I began to make friends, and quickly picked up on their ways and forms of communication. Up until that point I had only really known Spanish, and “proper” English. As I began surrounding myself with native New Yorkers and English speakers, I began to use their slang and general forms when speaking. 

School taught me the two forms of English I use today. Which eventually led me to learn code switching from a pretty early age. With my friends I could be “improper”, use slang and be generally casual while with the administrators and teachers I had to “speak correctly”. I realized that this was a skill I would have to use for pretty much the rest of my life. 

New York slang is based heavily in AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), which considering the history of the country, it is seen as improper. AAVE was developed in times of slavery and overall injustices towards the African-American community. Since during the time of slavery and segregation African-Americans were denied an education, or if they were given an education it wouldn’t be that great, therefore the forms in which African Americans spoke were seen as uneducated and improper. Although times have changed, that thinking and ideology still persists which is why casual talk or New York slang is seen as so improper and some people do even say it is an “uneducated” way of speaking. The white man’s way will always be superior, even if it is subconscious.

School created my language use, whether in a casual New York accent or in a stern more serious “professional” and “educated” manner. Thanks to these two different ways of speaking I was able to implement it into my writing, where I’ve curated a professional way of speaking that still implements some of my own personal elements with jokes, rhetorical analysis, and sort of like speaking to myself in my writing where I’m writing out my thoughts. I am able to keep my writing appropriate and proper due to what I have been taught in school and code switching but I still implement my own elements to make the writing truly my own without sounding like a robot. 

Language use is unique to the individual. Everyone has their own use of language and how they came about their use for language in writing, reading or even in their speaking. I found language to be a way of communication between myself and different groups of people, my different uses of language vary on who I am communicating with, or better known as code switching. Thanks to the different uses of language I’ve learned I am able to make my writing style unique to myself, implementing all these aspects I’ve learned. But other individuals may go about it in a different way.