English

Dear Ms. Laura Clark, Your article, while raising a few interesting and worrying points, completely missed the mark. Instead of blasting ‘text speak’ and saying that “ Youngsters are also in danger of growing up with limited vocabularies because they spend so much of their free time on sites such as Twitter…”, perhaps you should look to the parents and authority figures who should be teaching the children about the English language before blaming technology. As a ‘youngster’ myself, I feel that you shift the blame on to text speak too much, and give it unfair credit. It is also rather insulting to observe the generation raising us, cast their responsibility on to inanimate devices, that they themselves gave us. The fact is, is that both teachers and parents share a certain responsibility to teach children to do the right thing. Perhaps the staff should have made a better effort in making sure that the children knew to differentiate their writing styles for different contexts and ...

Note: This interview is set in modern day             Pink Floyd’s albums, “Dark Side of the Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals”, and “The Wall”, all contain references to social issues. While perhaps most known for their unique and psychedelic instrumental aspects of their songs, Pink Floyd was never a band that shied away from social issues, mainly referencing aspects of the human condition that we’d rather forget, such as greed/income inequality, war (only present in some of their songs/albums), and insanity/mental health issues. Their 1977 album, “Animals” is the most overtly political album in their collection, with lyricist Roger Waters painting a picture of a dark and dystopian society; inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Animal Farm”. Overall, Pink Floyd’s most often detailed social issue seems to be greed/inequality. One of their most famous songs, “Money”, is about greed/the relentless pursuit of money (here’s a link to the ly...

Language, while an important aspect of our identity, does not shape who we are. Language is a form of expressing who we are. We use language to communicate our ideas to one another. A person has the same personality regardless of what language they speak. In the various texts relating to the concept of mother tongue or bilingualism, the people were not shaped by their knowledge of a different language, but rather, their experiences due to their use of their languages. At best, language can only indirectly influence or define who we are. In “Mother Tongue”, by Amy Tan, Tan’s mother is often treated differently or worse than her daughter, due to the way she speaks. The way her mother spoke also defined her teenage years, with her being ashamed of or thinking less of her mother due to the way she spoke. Her studies of language also suffered in comparison to her studies of science and math, possibly due to the different style of English her mother spoke at home as well. While this may ...

While English is spoken as a second language more than as a native language, non-native speakers are often stereotyped or assumed to be, unintelligible or incoherent. As shown in Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue", her mother often gets worse service by doctors, department stores, restaurants, stockbrokers, in comparison to Tan. During her teenage years, Tan often had to call places for her mother, as shown in her interaction with the stockbroker, who may have decided to try and cheat her mother out of her money simply because he may have believed that she wouldn't be able to get her complaints through to his boss (due to her English skill level). Even she (when she was younger) had a negative perception about what her mother had to say, due to her mother's "limited" English. The text provides a perspective of how people with observable 'non-nativeness' (in terms of speaking English), can have very different experiences in day to day life, compared to na...

My first name, Victor, originates from Latin. It means victor, or conqueror. Its quite a universal name, and is pronounced very similarly in most languages, despite some languages spelling it differently (Viktor). Culturally, it seems to me like the name is more common in 'Latin' countries (France, Italy, Spain, etc.) or Eastern European countries (like Russia), in the form of Viktor, but this is my own personal observation, so it might not be necessarily true. As to how it affects my identity, I don't think it affects it very much. I'm not singled out or anything because of my name (I guess its quite international due to the Latin origin) like the author of that text we read about names in class was. I don't see myself as a conqueror, like my name suggests, but then again, who is a conqueror these days? However, I really dislike losing (who doesn't?), so that has to count for something, right? I guess the international nature of the name could be said to repre...

As a Norwegian, I find it quite hard to find a specific cultural stereotype or marker that the world has of us, as we are a small and not very well known country. So instead, I will address a few misconceptions and/or stereotypes about us. I'll start off with one that applies to all of the Scandinavian countries: That we have a sort of rivalry or dislike of each other going on. While we will make fun of each other a lot (e.g. How do you sink a Swedish submarine? Just knock on the door), this is done as more of a sibling thing. In fact, the countries are really quite close these days, basically like siblings. To be honest, I'm not really sure if this is even something that people actually believe and if so it is probably not widespread, but at least you now have some background knowledge. And to be fair, Denmark-Norway and Sweden have fought many wars from the 1500s to the early 1800s. I guess we ended up like Britain and France or France and Germany (France seems to change the...

Hello, I’m Victor, a Norwegian grade 11 student interested in various subjects; such as music, history, and writing. I find government interesting, but politics to be both annoying and boring.  I like listening to a variety of different music, such as Rock, Blues, Metal, and sometimes Jazz. It is interesting to observe the different styles of playing and other technical aspects that accompany different genres. I like various TV shows, and do go to the cinema, if there are good movies being shown at the time. I think that language is a very important subject to study, even if your job or dream job is in a subject other than English. Learning more about English or your own language allows you to express yourself better and more clearly. Being able to write better, might help make your writings easier to read and understand, which is good for reaching a wider audience. In my life, language allows me to express my point efficiently and effectively. Since I have only been to English ...