Ming Gui Xiao

10/26/2022

Rhetorical Analysis

On the internet, there exists a myriad of travelling documentaries where the vloggers would tour different places around the world. While touring, the videos would focus on many aspects of the area such as: food, tourist attractions, and region related festivals. When the vloggers interview the people who live in these areas, these people either speak a loose version of English, or in their native tongue; captioned translations inevitably edited into the documentary. One can assume that those who choose to speak in their native tongue when being interviewed is because they can fully express their ideas in a language that they are familiar with instead of struggling to articulate the words of a language that they don’t speak.

The writer, June Jordan, in her pollical essay, Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and The Future Life of Willie Jordan, published in 1985, address the topic of having a foreign language being overtaken by English and argues that replacing one language with another can inhibit communication. She supports this claim using personal experience, research, and statistics. Jordan’s purpose is to emphasize how foreigners must comply with a language that they aren’t familiar with in order to bring to attention that the foreigners aren’t deficient in intellect but rather it’s the way of expressing from their mouths. She adopts an informative tone for her audience, the readers of Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and The Future Life of Willie Jordan and others interested in the topic of world studies.

In most public schools in the US, there are students who speak English as a secondary language and sometimes they have trouble perceiving the higher-level vocabulary from an old book because their English isn’t well developed. To establish a foundation of credibility for her argument, Jordan decides to bring up her personal experiences of witnessing a language being overtaken by another in order to legitimize the situation that she explains to her audience. As a professor in English from the University of Berkely in California-2 years from the publication of her essay, Jordan was assigning 40 pages from a prize winning black-literature, to class that mostly composed of black students and later asked how they felt about the reading. “What did you say? I prompted her. Why did she have them talk so funny? It don’t feel right. You mean the language? Another student lifted his head: It don’t look right, neither. I could hardly read it”. Most of the black students in Professor Jordan’s class respond to her question with complaints on how they are unable to read this piece of African American literature because they claim that the author’s style of English is not their own. The student’s criticisms towards the author’s use of standard English could mean that a group of Jordan’s students speak their own style of English which suggest that these students are able to effectively communicate their ideas in their own adaptation of English, but their ways of speaking and hearing are being limited because they must reply to the standard English that they aren’t fluent in and cannot escape from.

In modern times, while travelling becomes more easily accessible due to advancements in transportation it’s not only people that move from place to place but also the language that they speak and potentially settle in. As Jordan reflects her personal encounters about the language situation to her audience, she addresses the scale of Standard English conflicting foreign adaptations of English by presenting research on areas outside of the United States where English is a secondary language. Jordan refers the style of English that some her college students speak as “Black English” which is a variant of English that is spoken in several parts of Africa, Jordan then lists the other parts of the World where English is spoken. “Countries as disparate as Zimbabwe and Malaysia, or Israel and Uganda, use it as their non-native currency of Convenience.” Along with a few countries in the African continent, Jordan includes countries from South Asia and the Middle East that also has English as one of its languages. Based on her research, Jordan pairs countries that speak Black English with countries outside of Africa that also use English as a secondary language in order to convey to her audience that each country is fluent in their own interpretation of English which emphasizes the size of the situation because if Standard English is trying to replace Black English, then there is a Domino Effect where Standard English can also replace other foreign adaptations of the language. 

When societies encounter something foreign such as language, they begin to form their own translations to adjust to the change on how people conversate eventually indoctrinating this new language into their customs by using their own articulations. If the statement from her research appears as speculation, then Jordan wants to emphasize to her audience how many people are struggling with communication due to a collision between their interpretation of the English language with its standard version, using numbers. Delving deeper into her research, Jordan quantifies the total amount of countries that use English including the previous 4 but converted into a population. “Obviously this tool, this “English” cannot function inside thirty-three discrete societies based on rules and values absolutely determined somewhere else. In addition to those staggering concierges of non-native users of English, there are four countries or 333,746,000 people for whom this thing called “English” serves as a native tongue.” Continuing from her discovery of four countries that speak their own version of English, Jordan finds 33 more countries that follow the same intentions but instead of summing up to 37 countries, she converts the previous 4 into a combined population of 334 million people who speak a different version of English. By representing these countries as a statistic, Jordan adds weight to her argument because if there are 37 countries that use an adaptation of English to communicate, attempting to replace this adaptation with standard English can lead to a devastating consequence in terms of how these people express or perceive words especially if 4 out the 37 countries equate to 334 million people who are at risk of having their way of communication being hindered.

Everyone has the potential to express their ideas, but this can be limited if presented in a different language. For example, some students in the US struggle to read old American literature because their use of English as a secondary language does not include the advanced vocabulary that these books expect them to know. The world becomes more connected due to advancements in transportation and travelers carry their cultural backgrounds with them including how they speak. In response, societies will form their own interpretations of a foreign language to better understand it when they encounter it. Words have a visual and vocal appearance which can affect how someone can express and perceive ideas.