Having read the autobiography of Fredrick Douglas and being able to reflect on the poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” I made connections throughout the length of the poem. One of the easiest connected trains of though between both the autobiography and the poem in the use of language. Throughout Douglas’ life he had a burning desire to learn more and become more fluent in the English language. In the poem we see how different the English language can be from different perspectives, in this case the perspective of a slave. M. NourbeSe Phillip speaks of father tongues and mother tongues and how languages are learned differently depending on the environment in which you grow up in. In the case of Douglas, he was raised on the plantation and he goes on to explain how certain phrases and sayings held different meanings based upon where you were raised. His example of this is when the select few were asked to run errands to the Big House Plantation they would sing songs that were almost gibberish to those outside the slaves who worked on the plantation. The poem then goes on to explain how the so called “mother tongue” is your native tongue and your “father tongue” is a foreign language to you. The connection I made to Fredrick Douglas’ life narrative was that both his mother tongue and father tongue were English, and that to many at that time the English language was both a native and foreign tongue. Much in the way the slave’s children were separated at birth with the intention to restrict human connection to a minimum. Another possible reason that was done was to prevent the children from ever learning the English language to a point where they could communicate and rebel. Douglas however contradicts this pattern as he does everything in his power to continuously learn more and further his knowledge of the language, overcoming the barriers of not having a diluted base-level understanding of the English language. Just as explained in the poem the issue that Douglas had initially is that his native language was unfortunately also a foreign language because there was no one that he lived with that knew the language well enough to teach him, or those that knew enough to teach were not allowed to by separation or just because they were white and did not have the desire to teach. Luckily for Douglas his mistress in Baltimore was willing to teach him English and did until his master forbid it eventually. The poem puts into words the difficulties explained by Douglas in learning the English language in how it was his native language and was raised speaking a lesser diction of it than most, but at the same time a foreign language because of the difficulties he had to overcome in order to gain the knowledge he used to write his own story.