How Language is Connected to Identity

I believe the language is a ‘driving force’ to communicate and build relationships with people around us. For me, it is also a tool to elaborate my thoughts and feelings so that I am so sure this would be the best form to present myself to the others. What I say here is my own definition of the language in the past. However, when I was first introduced to this current topic of “Language and Identity”, I faced with an intriguing statement that our identity can be influenced by the language we have spoken, and the identity can also influence the transformation of the language. This interrelationship between the language and identity stimulates my curiosity and also prompts my passion to seek for its correlation in real life situations.

Related to my interest, I saw a film called “Hyphen-Nation” that contains 9 different interviews with American citizens, who are still struggling to belong to an American nation. The fundamental reason they sometimes feel ‘exclusive’ is that their heredity is not 100% Americans - in other words, they are immigrants from other countries or have grown up in multi-cultural families. For that very reason, they are able to speak more than one language including English, and their ability to do so definitely influences one’s values, beliefs, and ideologies. As an extension of this idea, I recollect my experience when I was in a middle school. Back then I have studied in the international school in America. Landing on a totally new land that I’ve never been before was quite overwhelming to me. Like a newborn baby, I should adapt and acknowledge a new world from A to Z. Besides encountering new lifestyle and intrinsic ways of living in the new culture brought me so-called ‘culture shock’. A few months later, as soon as I learned and get used to using English, I behaved as if I were an American teenager. I surprisingly started to forget how I have usually hanged out with Korean friends. There was then the confusion of my identity, as I felt more fitting into an “American”, not a Korean. Reflecting upon this experience, I realize introducing to a new language is understandably faced with its culture and affects the formation of one’s identity. Therefore, not only the language itself, having been experienced with multiple cultures would also bring us a lot of crash in many different perspectives like the way we dress up.

I also saw another text type in which the interrelationship of language and identity is mainly discussed. It is a news article titled “Donald Trump’s Fear of Spanish Reveals the Power in Our Language – and Identity”. In this article, the author Lozada delineates that she had the experience of being in a confusing situation where two different identities conflict with each other. It’s because her parents are Spanish people who have followed the Spanish intrinsic culture for their whole lifetime, but she has lived in America and has been forced to assimilate into the American culture. Once she turned out to be a 15-years old girl, in Latino culture people have celebrated one’s 15th birthday on a great scale by having “Quinceanera” in order to honor and acknowledge the girl as a grown-up individual of the society. By the way, as powerfully said by the author, it has been regarded as “out-fashioned” culture for her. She basically wanted to reject and get rid of any Spanish background for her. In the reality, it is very poignant often one culture is considered to be inferior to one another and many people misunderstand acculturating is the best way of establishing one’s identity. By seeing this article, I come up with a conclusion that loss of a language means the loss of cultural identity.

I am the one who can speak, read, and write in both Korean and English – not a perfect bilingual person, though. Often the capability of speaking two languages results into the ambiguity of defining the identity. I believe natural events of coming across multiple cultures would be a trigger point of enriching my knowledge and even impacting to my identity.