Back to the Books

Because I had some confusion with my initial direction for project 3, I'd like to take a step back and use this blog post as an opportunity to look at what it means to be multilingual. I am not multilingual. Maybe someday I will be, but for now I'm only able to read at an intermediate level in Spanish and not much else, and I do not consider that being multilingual. To be multilingual is to have the ability to communicate effectively in all forms of communication in a given language. Because I am not multilingual, it's hard for me to fully grasp what being multilingual is like. In doing some research for this blog, I came across an idea that I was unfamiliar with in a TedTalk: being multilingual can be viewed as a negative trait. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this is true. We always talk about the positives of being multilingual, like decreased chances to get Alzheimers and increased cognitive flexibility, but in order to understand what it's real

*This Language Log doubles as my Exploratory Writing for Project 3 I plan on writing a personal essay on how the Iroquois and their language has impacted the region of New York that I live in. This essay will likely have researched elements, as I do not currently feel prepared to write a 2,000 word essay on the topic, but the style will remain personal in nature, and I will take cues from our recent readings on how to incorporate sources without citing them as if the paper was a strictly academic piece. Because this essay should be 2,000 words and not too much larger, I will keep the conversation to how the Iroquois and their language impacted the societal and cultural development of Central Upstate New York rather than, say, the economic development of Central New York. This is a fairly complicated topic, and I believe that if I wanted to dive into the specifics and really research this, this paper could easily go on for 20,000 words, which is the primary reason why I am going to wr

Easter is right around the corner and with it, my normally very religious Roman Catholic family is increasing the talk we have about religious themes. It could also be that we're restricted from going to church and this is some sort of spiritual outlet for us. Anyways, my mom posed a question: What language did Jesus speak? This was a slam dunk for me - I had taken a class first semester that covered the societal and legal history of Ancient Israel, so I knew the answer was... "Hebrew!" Exclaimed my father. Of course, this was incorrect. I knew the right answer. "No, it's Aramaic" I responded. It turns out we were both right. When we researched the topic after getting nowhere saying "I'm right" and "Nuh-uh" a couple of times, it turns out that Jesus spoke Aramaic but was proficient in Hebrew, which I guess shouldn't come as a surprise to me or to anyone. Aramaic, for anyone who doesn't know, is another Semit

Being home for the first time in 8 weeks, I've begun to pick back up on the regional dialect, the accent of the place I come from (despite having only left the house twice in the last two weeks for obvious, Coronavirus related reasons). I never really even noticed that my region had a peculiar accent, I never thought I sounded all that different from anyone on TV. When I went to college, I didn't think I sounded that weird either, however, I had many people tell me that I have a strange accent. I decided to research whether or not linguists agree that my area is known for a unique accent or dialect and I can say conclusively that I did not come up with a conclusive answer to my question, but I will share with you what I did learn. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/f4z8ae/detailed_map_showing_accents_in_the_united_states/ First, I'd like to start with a map. The link for it is posted above. I found a lot of dialect maps, some on more reputable websites than red

Quick note: This is my first blog post in a long time due to the hectic nature of this semester so far, but I will be hopefully posting two blog posts a week for the next couple weeks in order to get back on track. --- To say that everybody is talking about the coronavirus would be inaccurate: that was a week and a half ago. Covid-19 has gone from a distant, little known phenomenon to a topic of conversation and jokes to what it is now which is a fact of life. The virus has any of us who are following the guidance of authorities seriously staying indoors - indefinitely. Something that has such an impact on the daily lives of not just our country, but the entire world must be impacting the language we use, and it is. The first word I'd like to discuss is the term "pandemic". The World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus a global pandemic earlier this month, but "pandemic" is not within the everyday vocabulary of most people, so what does it mean?

My Project 2 topic is “Should there be a lingua franca?” and it is a little ambitious as it tackles the implications of having a lingua franca: so that entails why we have one and why we need it, as well as whether or not having English as the lingua franca is fair, and if not, what language we could possibly use instead. I’m really excited about my topic, because the reason I took this class was to learn more about when and how people use English (or another language) to bridge communication gaps, and so I want to use this language log as a way to talk about my topic, and as a way to put some of my ideas on paper before I actually start writing my essay.  I’m going to focus on a subset of my research which is “Could another language be the lingua franca?”  The first thing to look at here is the sheer number of speakers. This includes native and non-native speakers, not just native, because we are looking at the possibility of these languages becoming the/a lingua franca. So som