Reflections on language.

This is an essay I just wrote for my linguistics class. It seemed like something fitting to post here, likely because of the autobiographical nature. It's much more like the blogs I typically post than the academic essays I typically write. You all get the chance to read it before my professor. You should count yourselves privileged. ;-)

Here it is:

Linguistic Autobiography

For as long as I can remember, language in its various forms has been a subject of interest to me. As sure as I am that I gained a conscious awareness of language at some point early on in my life, I don't remember it, so for my current purposes it's as if it's always been there. My parents like to tell a story about the first time they believe I ever read when I was no more than two or three years old. My parents, younger brother, and I were in the car one day, driving around our hometown and one of the many places of business we passed was a KFC restaurant. My parents weren't the type of people who would constantly point out words and letters to get their child to start recognizing them and essentially memorize what they are before developing the cognitive function we call reading, so they were pleasantly surprised when my small voice sounded from the back seat and said, “That says 'Kentucky Fried Chicken.'” Shortly after I started kindergarten, I rose to be one of the highest readers in my class, and I remember reading an entire book, one that had quite a few words and fairly advanced sentence structure, to my mother at the age of six.

As I grew, I continued to read. If one could be said to devour books, I certainly did. I remember making a trip to the library once around the age of eight and borrowing thirty books. By the next day, I was ready for more. This exposure to language, I think, aided my consciousness of it. Spending as much time looking at words as I did naturally led to me thinking more about them.

Before reading, though, like most people, I did learn to speak. I always chose my words carefully and strove for correctness. I don't know for certain how I developed a sensitivity to correctness in language, but I expect it was influenced by my mother. Both of my parents spoke with a high level of awareness of speech, but my mother paid particular attention to her choice of words, how she pronounced them, and how she strung them together. I was born in Arkansas, as was my mother, and until the first time that our family moved out of the state, that was the only place she had lived and she fought hard against what she calls her “southern roots.” She always wanted to be more intentional with her use of language than was common in the people around her. By the time I began my formal education and was introduced to the rules of English grammar, I took to them quickly, and the subjects of English, language, reading, and spelling were always my favorites.

Despite the fact that I did learn to use language first through speech, I remember being shocked at the idea that language could exist without writing. Sometime early in my education, a teacher introduced me to Sequoyah, the man credited with the invention of the Cherokee alphabet. Letters and the use of them in forming words that can be seen rather than heard was so common to me and so definitive of how I viewed language, that it was mind-boggling to think that a language could exist for so long without having an alphabet. In my mind, people spoke based on the dictates of written language, not the other way around.

In opposition to the time I spent reading was the time I spent talking. Just because I learned to speak first doesn't mean that I preferred speech over writing, and I think this was reflected in how I viewed the place of writing in language. Many people would often joke that they thought I couldn't talk because of how rarely I spoke when I was in their presence. My tendency to think about language due to how much I read, along with my relative quietness, led to me paying close attention to the speech of people around me. I would study the way people said things, their choice of words, the way they organized them to communicate, their pronunciations. I would notice patterns in families, whether it be between parents and children or individuals and their siblings.

This only increased after my family made its first big move. When I was six, we moved from Arkansas to Tennessee, and I was exposed to a whole new group of people. Not only was I surrounded by native Tennesseans, Nashville, the city where we moved to, had a higher population of people who came originally from somewhere else than the area where I had lived previously. From that first major move, my family continued to relocate often, moving as far away from the region of the South as Maryland. Through all of this, I was exposed to a wide variety of accents and dialects. Each new person I met meant another opportunity to analyze language.

In middle school, my thoughts on language were allowed to expand even further. I went to an academic magnet school in Nashville and they started exposing their students to foreign languages immediately. In fifth grade, I studied six weeks in Spanish as well as French. Then in sixth grade, I did six weeks of study in German and Latin. Out of all of them, I particularly liked German and I ended up taking four semesters of it at MTSU. In studying a different language, I began to turn the thoughts I was having about it toward my own language in order to gain a new perspective I had never had as a native speaker. As a result, not only did my interest in studying my own language increase, my interest in language in general grew like it never had before, and I developed a fascination with the way people communicate.

My life thus far seems to have lent itself to nurturing an affinity for language that seems to have been there from birth. I have a feeling that my love for language will only increase as my life continues. Now that I'm aware of this love, indeed ever since I became aware of this love, I am motivated even more to spend time and energy contemplating and learning about language. Each new discovery I make sparks new interest, so the more I know the more I want to know.