Language Autobiography

Everybody speaks his or her own version of English, even people who live in the same neighborhood. If you look at the world, only some countries speak English. If you look at the English speaking countries, only The United States speaks “American English.” If you look at the US, only New York speaks with a “New York accent.” If you look at New York, only Brooklyn speaks with a “Brooklyn” accent. If you look at the families in Brooklyn, each individual family speaks differently, and everyone in the family speaks differently. This narrowing process can be done for any one person in the World. If you were to listen to everyone in a family speak, you would assume everybody spoke the same way, but the differences are very subtle, such as word used frequently in between pauses, or the speed they talk. All of these differences can separate that person’s individual way of speaking from everybody else’s.

There’s a reason everyone’s language is more similar to those they are around a lot. When you are a baby, you learn a language by listening, and repeating what you hear. In a sense, you are copying someone else’s language; but because you are copying from more than one person, your language will be a combination of more than one person’s language. It will be similar to all of them, but different, and therefore unique. It’s not just from your parents that you learn language though, you learn it from friends, teachers, television; you learn it from anything that you can hear the language from. The more time you spend with one specific thing, the more it influences you. Your language is constantly developing and changing, and it will never stop unless you separate all contact with the outside world.

Language is just another thing that makes individuals unique. If you look at the way you speak, the words you use, the way you say them, your language stops feeling “normal”, but it doesn’t seem wrong. You can trace the words you use, and your speech quirks to different groups. I generally speak “calmly” with my words evenly spaced, which is something that my dad does. I sometimes say the word “like” a lot to fill blank spaces in my speech, which is something my friends would do in elementary school. My mom and dad have had the biggest impact on my language, I use similar words to them, have similar speech patterns, and combine the differences in their speech to make my own language.