Abstract

My main argument for this paper is going to be that there should not be standards of languages in any society. The two articles I will be using for this show examples in which two different scinarios brought up problems of using different languages. The two articles are June Jordan's "Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan" and Min-Zhan Lu's "From Silence to Words: Writing as a struggle." In Jordan's text, she explains how her class used black English. Her students were reading a story in black english called "The Color Purple." While they were reading this, Willie Jordan, a student in the class, his brother was killed by the Brooklyn police. June Jordan thought it was appropriate that they write a letter to the police station using Black english. Through it all, the community, overall, rejected the use of the language and the reasons that were presented in the letter. In Lu's article, she tells about herself and how she went through some hard times as a youth using two languages. She lived in China and was taught to only use Chinese in school. Her parents then taught her the "western language," or simply English. SHe had a hard time not using English once and awhile in school and was punished for it. Lu did not see why this was happening and felt that it was okay for her to be using it. Lu later on became an English teacher. There is not a real big significance surrounding my argument, other than the fact that there should be no language barriers or standards in any society.