LANGUAGE, POWER & IDENTITY Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

LANGUAGE, POWER & IDENTITY - Essay Example Furthermore, language convergence and membership of a person in groups are also determined based on the languages that they know (THOMAS And WAREING, 1999). Bi-lingual or Multi-lingual Having the ability to speak two differently languages fluently marks a bi-linguist, whereas the ability to speak more than one language fluently marks a person as being a multi-linguist. Being bi-lingual or multi-lingual can be and is often for a number of reason, but mostly the adoption of more than one language occurs more rapidly in the early childhood stage of a person’s life. Whether it is because of a competent and saturated job market, parents or grandparents belonging to different nationalities or because one has migrated elsewhere, the reasons for accounting to a person being a bi-linguist or multi-linguist are many. Influences on Social identity of a person who is multi-lingual In order to case study the influences, impacts and effects of language diversity on a person, it is important to understand some majorly important terms and influences that shape the changed personal identity of a person. ... Individuals of a specific speech community communicate more often with each other than with individuals outside their speech community and so there exist preference and speech community isolation, which is also termed as communicative isolation. This is influenced by social, cultural, economic or regional similarities or preferences. To understand the term community better, we can analyze that the family of an individual is also a community and there by the language with which they communicate will form a speech community too. Furthermore, speech community is also observed with friends or the employees of the work place. It is noted that the changes in accent, dialect, written Performa or the differences in the languages spoken by individuals also mark changes and developments of speech communities (AGER, MUSKENS And WRIGHT, 1993). The community in general may have a focused set of characteristics of a language being communicated or it can be also diffused with emergence of different widely varying set of characteristics. Code-switching An individual, who is well-versed in more than one language, often tends to change or switch languages while speaking. Either to stress on a specific word, to lay emphasis on the issue or to just make someone laugh or impress the other- the use and reason for code switching varies from person to person and situation to situation. Sometimes, it also occurs unknowingly (NORTON, 2000). Linguistic convergence The lexical, phrasal, verbal or grammatical borrowings or transfusions from one language to another is often termed as linguistic convergence i.e. the convergence or merger of more than one languages, accents or dialects into another. Sometimes it is