76-490 Discourse and Identity Units: 9.0 Department: English Cross-listed: 76-890 Related URLs: http://hss.cmu.edu/HTML/departments/engl People who learn a new language sometimes find that the experience feels like becoming a new person. The novelist Eva Hoffman moved, as an adolescent, from Poland to Canada. Her memoir of this period in her life is entitled Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language. Hoffman describes the terrifying difficulty not just of talking but of thinking, seeing, knowing, even living when ones "interior language" has to change: "What has happened to me in this new world? I dont know. I dont see what Ive seen, dont comprehend whats in front of me. Im not filled with language anymore, and I have only a memory of fullness to anguish me with the knowledge that, in this dark and empty state, I dont really exist" (Hoffman 1989: 108). Hoffman's experience points to the importance of language for personal identity -- our sense of being the same person from moment to moment and from situation to situation. For example, being the same person from day to day can mean having the same memories, shaped and stored in the same stories. Language is also a key aspect of social identity -- the ways we project membership in various groups and how others categorize us and interpret our behavior. Languages and ways of speaking are sometimes associated with national identities, and groups of people who aspire to nationhood may insist on their own language, as have the Basques and the Irish. Languages and ways of speaking are associated with religious identities Islam with Arabic and with particular practices of its use, Catholicism, traditionally, with Latin and with an associated set of linguistic ideologies and discursive practices. Choosing to speak one language rather than another, or to speak in a mixture of languages, can be a way of claiming an ethnic identity, as can be seen among Hispanics or Asian Americans in the US. (see department for full description.)

Discuss this course  Textbook prices  View FCE Results  View FCE Results Prior to Fall 2004  Check Availability   Popularity index Rank for this semester: #0 Rank in this department: #0   Students also scheduled 65-402 Humanities Scholars Senior Research... 85-421 Language and Thought 76-386 Language & Culture 76-318 Communicating in the Global Marketp... 82-388 Understanding Second Language Fluen... 76-451 Topics in Language Study 82-358 Literacies Across Language and Cult... 80-380 Philosophy of Language 76-457 Topics in Language Study: Historica... 76-420 Process of Reading and Writing