Humanities Homework Help

Watch this Ted Talk from Prof. Anna Babel, who talks about the intricate relationship between language and culture, showing how social categories and underlying biases influence the way we hear, regard, and ultimately, judge each other. In which ways do you agree with her perspective, and in which ways do you disagree? How does her talk relate to what we have read in Ch. 0 and Ch. 1?

Instructions

• Post your initial post by Thursday of this week. Your response should be 100-150 words in length, and you should connect the elements in the journal topic to our course in some way. You should also include your personal experiences, tying them into the course.
  • You won’t be able to see anyone else’s post before you write your own—and that’s on purpose. Use this time to reflect on your experiences. Remember that there are ‘no wrong answers’—so long as you use the information that we have learned thus far in the course to your work, then all is good!
• Between Friday and Sunday, please reply to at least two of your colleagues’ posts. Useful comments include engaging in dialogue, reflection, or suggestion. If you find that you agree with a given response and have nothing else to add, then I challenge you to reply to someone who has a different perspective than yours, and explore the differences.

1.I agreed with their perspective on how speaking a different language from one person may seem like you’re in conflict while speaking the same language means you belong to the same group and working together. Sometimes when a language is elevated to a high degree or tied to presteige it seems like something to use against people if they can’t speak that languge. And She cleared this point up by explaining how we can put social categories in language perception.

When she spoke about how a few of her students wouldn’t consider themselves speakers despite their advanced level in the language, I felt a connection or a similarity to how I feel. Even though I grew up speaking Spanish, I refrain from saying that I am fluent speaker because the quality and understanding of that language have dropped significantly over the years. Yes, I can speak Spanish, but I don’t speak it very well.

In chapter 1, there is a disticntion made between dialects and language and the key to it is mutual intelligibility. We can understand dialects okayish but even if two languages are related speakers of those languages would have a hard time understanding each other.

This tedtalk reminds me of what I learned while watching Chinese dramas. The standard language in mainland China is Mandarin, which is based on northern dialect of Beijing. So when actors are starring in a drama or movie, if their Mandarin is not very good or clear then a professional voice actor will voice over their lines so it sounds more like standard Mandarin.2Categorizing someone base on their language and culture plays a role in everyone’s life. We can be biased towards how we see ourselves and how we may view others. Either if we intentionally want to or not, we usually have a subconscious bias that judges people. Professor Anna Babel demonstrates how our bias can make us blind to aspects that should be clear to see throughout her ted talk.
I also don’t see myself as a Spanish speaker too much now due to my deterioration of vocabulary. I have a high bar in what I would call someone a Spanish speaker, so I have my own self-bias on myself in not categorizing myself there also. The same goes for English in its grammatical sense. This is why I could relate when Professor Babel spoke about her students not thinking about themself as Spanish speakers and the bilingual people thinking they don’t speak either language very well.
My parents are from Peru, and I have studied in Peru momentarily and saw the relationship between languages social categories. Living there, depending on which part you grew up in, you are labeled as smart or not. The dialect of Spanish you speak is a telling sign to see where you grow up if your physical appearance doesn’t say it already. Growing up in Lima, the notion is that they are the more intelligent people due to their dialect in Spanish. There Spanish being the more sophisticated and correct way of speaking. However, the dialect outside of Lima being feeble-minded and more uncivilized people. One of them being dialect in La selva, Sierra, and Quechua. Even though Quechua is now our official language in Peru on paper, it is still seen negatively when people speak it.
Looking at the Ted talk, I can see the correction with our lecture. Here we talk about how we as humans always try to differentiate stuff as we label things and judge them. Language is one of them. One may think that maybe one language is superior to another, making the superior party intelligent; however, in Ch 1. We understand that language, in the end, is equal as they both share some universal properties like phonology. Just speaking human language shows intelligibility.