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3. Recall the experience of some newcomer trying to enter your community or trying to appropriate and use your own language. How did you feel or react? What does it mean to “own” language, and what is entailed in “taking” or adopting” a language or a set of rituals and traditions? Recall an experience when some misunderstanding occurred in a bi-cultural or multicultural context despite everyone trying to be well intentioned and polite. In a journal entry, explore what it was about the social context failed “in translation.”

My Language

When people asked me what it means to have you own language. I will always answer it is how you thinks and talk about certain subject. The kinds of vocabulary are you using when you talk. To me, language can measure a person education skill and the culture of that person. A person with a high education will talk a different language than person with a lower education; it goes the same for a person’s culture. So the language can define the person.

A person goes to new community that has with different language and culture than that person. The person needs to learn and adopt the language of the community. If not, he or she will not able to adjust into the community and left out. During my freshmen year, there was a newcomer kid that transfer into our class. He tries to join my group of friends but was not successful, because we have a hard time understood each other and we have few things in common. He uses vocabularies that have different meaning in his and my language. After few weeks, he could not adopt the language in our group, so we end up been complete stranger in the end.

Language is important in that community. It can help or break a newcomer. A person who has different language than the community can be rejected by that very community. A person needs to adopt the language in he or she wants to be accept into the community, because the language define the person and the community. Like David Berreby said in his essay “It Takes a Tribe”. People don’t just go and live in some place; they join the tribe in that place. They learn the rules (language) of the tribe.