The Plethora of “Englishes”

As the first generation of my family to be born in the United States of America, I have firsthand experience of being exposed to different Englishes. Having two parents who were born in a foreign country gave me the privilege of learning more than one language from a young age. Since my parents were born and raised in India, a country with over 19,500 spoken languages, they spoke more than one Indian language. When I was a child, I was exposed to Tamil, Hindi, and Telegu so frequently that I could easily understand native speakers of all of those languages. When I attended school in America for the first time, I was introduced to a fourth language and as a six-year-old, I was even more confused. According to my parents, I would speak by combining all four languages into one, employing vocabulary from all four languages into every sentence that would come out of my mouth. My parents were frightened because even as fluent speakers of all four languages, they could barely understand what I was saying. They began to cut down on the languages that they spoke at home until I was only speaking English and Tamil, but today I unfortunately mainly speak English even at home. Unlike Amy Tan, however, the English that I speak at home is not drastically different from the English that I speak at school, but sometimes I have noticed that I pronounce words differently based on whether I am speaking in the American form of English or the British based English spoken in India. When I come to school and accidentally use the wrong pronunciation, some teachers and classmates look at me funny. Consequently, I have learned to embrace my pronunciation as I have embraced my Indian heritage.

My various Englishes are not just the Englishes that I speak at home and at school but also the Englishes that I use when texting and presenting. The Englishes that I speak at home and at school represent how I interact with my family versus my friends and teachers. The English that I use when texting is extremely informal and filled with abbreviations. Though I am still interacting with my friends the difference in English that I use represents the impact that an educational environment has on how I speak. When I present or write an essay, my English is very formal as I am forced to adopt an academic and intellectual tone and vocabulary that would develop my credibility. Through our exploration of the impact of various languages, I have learned that a balance has to be achieved. When writing, you should not be too formal as it could separate you from your audience, but you should also not be too informal as the audience might not take you seriously. Achieving the balance provides the speaker with power and authority as it increases the chances of the audience listening and taking an effort to understand what the speaker is conveying. Through the honors classes I have taken and the AP English class I am taking, I have realized that the Englishes that I employ are the products of the environment that I have grown up in and the medium by which I communicate.