Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Language Investigation #1 : Language in Groups
When I think about communities that I am member, I also must think of the people within in those communities. The first one that comes to mind for me is my close group of friends. I have 5 close male friends and we do almost everything together and hang out almost every weekend. The main part of our language that distinguishes us from others is simply that we have known each other for a long time and use certain words and "inside jokes" that separate us from others. If a new person joined our community and attempted to use lingo in our popular topics which include basketball, people we know, video games, and things that are fairly particular to our life. I think experience is the main part of our community and is the root and base of all of our language. The other community that I am part of is my work life. I work for BASE Camp at Kruse Elementary. This is an after school program where we have between 20-30 kids before and after school. I work with 2 others at this job and like my friends the basis of our community is experience. It is not like a random person can come up and talk about the funny thing our kindergartener did during snack. It just does not work that way. It is easy to relate to each other because we all put as much as we can and time into our jobs as possible and therefore we always have something to talk about. The language that we use is pretty exclusive because it is about things that we went through and went through together. This increases the strength of our relationships and creates a closer community. Overall, I found out that experience and the people that experience those same things with you are the basis for how you use language.
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That's so true. I definitely feel the same way about the special language that I share with my close friends and family and how it is gained through experience with each other. Sometimes having that language can exclude others, so when new people come into my close community circles (even for a short time), I always try to create an experience that we can share. This way they feel a part of something as well. It is so interesting how language can have such a powerful effect. In that, it can easily exclude or include individuals.
ReplyDeleteThis was very interesting because I never even thought to use inside jokes for this assignment. My friends and I always have tons of inside jokes too. Practically every time we are together we come up with a new one. I am sure people think we are crazy and weird but we think we are hilarious. Inside jokes do kind of build a community. Insightful.
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