Kamal Belmihoub and Lucas Corcoran on pages 61-65 of our course textbook (you didn’t have to read this, but recommend you do so!) sum up the recent linguistic research about how we learn and use language that is called translingualism.

The main gist is this: there really aren’t separate languages, only mix of the ones we use based on the different stores of words and grammar we learn.

So, it might be more accurate to say that we all have our own “language” that we speak, which is a mix of different languages to make up the total communicative resources we have.

We have different competencies.

1. Linguistic competence: knowledge of grammar and vocabulary for a language you speak
2. Strategic competence: using non-linguistic features to help communicate (e.g., body language)
3. Discourse competence: is it coherent, is it complete (enough)
4. Sociolinguistic competence: culturally appropriate to situation

You have this whole wide amount of resources, why not use them all where you see fit and where you want to use them? Feel free to play around with them where you are comfortable. That’s why I wanted to focus on “joy” in your blog post, for instance. You all have many languages and some of them really feel like home. Lean into that when you want and where you are comfortable.

To get a sense of the resources you have to draw from, let’s try to brainstorm all of the linguistic resources you have. This could be a great thing to think through in your Literacy Narrative (either in the draft you turn in on Feb 17 or the revised version on March 8).

Here are my unofficial languages, for an example:

• US White Mainstream English
• “Academic” English (e.g., “let’s unpack that”; “problematize”; “dissertation”)
• US government / military English (e.g., “get the digits for that,” “what are the due outs?”, “shut up and color”)
• South Philly / South Jersey English (e.g., “looka dis strapper,” “wooder,” “don’t need no beggels”)
• Western Pennsylvania English (e.g., “nebby”, “dippy eggs,” “slippy,” “chip-chop ham”)
• Restaurant Work English (e.g., “right behind ya”)
• Italian American English (e.g., “galamar,” “moozarell,” “greaseball”)
• Gaming (e.g., “gg”)
• US Sports Fan (e.g., “defense wins championships,” “establish the run game,” “want the shot”)
• Parenting English (I speak a different way to my young kids!: “potty,” “bye bye”)
• Internet(??) English (from computers in general, Twitter, Reddit, etc.: “evergreen,” “tweet through it,” “tl;dr”, “hard restart”)
• Very Basic School Spanish (e.g., “ir a la playa,”—I liked to go to the beach when I wrote essays for Spanish classes)
• Very Basic School German (e.g., Don’t make me try to remember this 6 week class)
• Italian Curse Words (really, just part of Italian American above) (e.g., “fongool”/”fanculo,” “marone”)

Task

Brainstorm all of the languages you speak/write and post them to our Discord server in the text channel “feb-17-your-languages” in the “Reading/Writing Discussion” category. Try to provide example words/phrases/grammatical constructions/pronunciations with definitions as necessary (see my examples above for me, but you will undoubtedly have different languages than the ones I speak/write).

Respond to each other if you notice you have some similarities!

After posting to Discord, click the button below to continue: