Broadway | The Guardian: Immigrants moving to the west are forced to shed a layer of themselves for the sake of belonging. Traditional names are reconstructed and collapsed into digestible English versions. Accents from faraway countries are either buried for protection or wither away over time. English, as a language, becomes a mandatory mother tongue.
2 comments:
As someone who is fascinated by language, its power, and how it is used, I love this play and its exploration of the effects language has on our identities. I have not seen it (I hope to change that in the future), but from reading about it I understand it to be a beautifully nuanced and complex story. This story also explores the characters’ various reasons for wanting to learn English and how they view it. The contrast this article discusses between the “poetic” sound of Farsi and the “clunky” sound of English is fascinating to me. From a linguistic point of view, I wonder if there is an explanation for this phenomenon. Why do some languages sound more poetic than others? This of course would require defining what poetic means in this context, but I am still curious. Even within languages, what makes some strings of sounds sound more poetic than others? Is there a commonality across languages of what sound sequences sound poetic to our ears?
I don’t like how English has become the dominating language of the world. Being a first-gen American born to a mom who’s first language was not English and her only learning the language in her late 20’s, even now, it’s important that this perspective gets shared to people. There’s a lot of people who don’t know how hard it is to learn a new language, especially English, when there’s so much outside pressure to learn it efficiently. I think it’s really important that this show is being brought to Broadway because people need to cut non-native speakers so much slack. I like how each character has a different motivator to learn English, and I like the ways they explore what English means to all of them. This is definitely a show I would go and see and I hope that other people feel the same way.
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