My Linguistic Autobiography
by S. Tavera
Reading the New York Times during my adolescent years did irreparable damage to my personality. In 2015, my parents decided to homeschool me for eighth grade. The countless hours of being home alone sucked me into a black hole of ultraliberal academic Twitter, NPR podcasts, and breaking news updates from the Obama administration. Throughout high school, I religiously started my morning with the New York Times morning newsletter, wasting hours of my day reading articles and engaging with Twitter threads to stroke my feelings of intellectual superiority. True story: when I learned the word pedantic, I started to proudly and unironically use it to describe myself. Every day I spent in my echo chamber made me more insufferable as I slowly began blurring the lines between critical thinking skills and a mere command of rhetoric. When I cringingly think back to those years, I see myself as a naked emperor walking shamelessly through the town. Language was my invisible clothes.
Admitting that I bought into the worst veins of Standard English ideology (Clark, 350) is especially embarrassing for me, but I think we’ve all been victim to the conflation of articulation and eloquence with intelligence. For anyone with a marginalized identity, clinging to the overt prestige of Standard English can be a mechanism for social mobility (Alim and Smitherman, 233). This isn’t just an implicitly understood phenomenon. For me, it was an explicit mandate from my parents that I speak English well (their actual words were “speak English good!”). Before I had the fancy language to describe my linguistic experiences, I had this dirty feeling that I was an impostor among intelligent white people. Their compliments of my articulateness genuinely made me feel good. I didn’t feel offended or condescended to, instead, I felt relieved that my otherness was imperceptible. Alim and Smitherman describe this “split view” held by bilingual speakers of English; we want to be accepted as speakers of good English, but so many complicated feelings arise from this process of assimilation (231). Am I being authentic? Do I sound intelligent? In my head, the answers to these two questions often contradict.
In seventh grade, I won the spelling bee at my small Christian school, beating the only white boy in my class. I remember how good it felt to watch his pale face get flushed with embarrassment and anger. I felt like I had owned him for knowing his language better than he did. At some point, it was ingrained in me, and in all of my non-white peers, that white people were smarter than us. I wish I could pinpoint the moment this happened—I certainly never intentionally thought so. The tools with which we were taught to discern intelligence never felt ours. History wasn’t ours; science wasn’t ours; English wasn’t ours.
To this day, I struggle to sound intelligent without trying to sound white. I haven’t figured out how to be smart authentically. When I’m being lauded for my intelligence, I’m being lauded for my ability to transcend my very unfortunate first-generation Dominican-ness. Imani Perry (one of the Twitter academics I used to follow), says of raciolingustic exceptionalism that it is an attempt to create meaning out of non-white people who don’t fit the stereotypes assigned to them (Alim and Smitherman, 228). I’ve always manipulated this to my benefit—if you have privilege, use it, am I right? More than any other privilege that I have, linguistic credibility has been the most crucial. For someone who was raised thinking that Wall Street was for rich, old white men, it’s bizarre that I’ve somehow affirmative-actioned myself into a finance job post-graduation. That’s how it feels. I’m here because I impressed my interviewers by being an intelligent diverse candidate. I’m here to look diverse, not be it. If I slip up and say dique or deadass, they’re gonna kick me out!
White liberals might read my previous paragraph and congratulate me on breaking into finance. Listen, I’ve been there! You listen to Obama speak enough times and you’ll be entranced by the fantasy of the American melting pot and the American dream. He did it! We can do it! The perception of Standard English as a “unifying, multiracial, multiethnic force” dangerously conceals its inextricability from white supremacy (Alim and Smitherman, 233). My social mobility is conditional on my perfect English. I am American only as long as I sound like it (235). This makes authenticity impossible. Case in point, even Obama code-switches.
Sharon Lee De La Cruz, an Afro-Latina author and comic artist, recently gave a talk at Baruch during which she pointed out how she learned the language of her lived experience in a white academic setting. Her words came to mind as I read excerpts from Michael Newman’s New York City English, specifically when he discussed loan translation, “when English words are used in structures or meanings that match with Spanish equivalents” (Newman, Section 4.3.2). His example of using like that to mimic the Spanish así reminded me of Cardi B’s “I Like It Like That,” which I guess should technically be “I Like It That Way.” Cardi B’s rise to fame as a “regular degular schmegular girl from the Bronx” gave momentum to the increasing covert prestige of Spanglish and Dominican New York City English. It’s interesting to notice the differences between covert prestige and linguistic insecurity (Clark, 368). Even as Black English and Spanglish have become the languages of pop culture, Standard English is still deferred to as correct. Speakers of nonstandard Englishes, no matter how “cool” they are, still must code-switch to avoid being discredited and dismissed. I tread this fine line nervously, knowing that my dialect and accent are just as likely to be perceived as unprofessional and unintelligent as they are to be perceived as sexy and cool.
On the first day of high school, I didn’t stand for the pledge of allegiance. I’d just come out of a year of homeschooling, and the whole ordeal seemed quite dystopian. I got some stares, but it wasn’t until November of sophomore year—a day after Trump got elected—that I was suddenly sent to the principal’s office for it. Needless to say, I’d been having a shitty morning. So, when my principal told me that I had to stand for the pledge of allegiance, every shred of eloquence left my body. I broke down on his desk and couldn’t say a word. That day, on the walk home from school, I felt so humiliated. I’d been unable to defend myself. I hadn’t asserted my rights, and I knew them (from reading the New York Times every morning). It was one of the first moments when I realized how naked I was. No matter how articulate I tried to be, ultimately, my identity made me linguistically deficient (Alim and Smitherman, 234). American-ness, complete with its values, rights, and language, wasn’t mine.
In her chapter on language variation, Mary Clark asks, “Given the stigmas attached to nonstandard varieties [of English], why don’t they disappear?” (Clark, 350). Standard English is the language of many of my favorite books. It’s the language of my favorite professors and it’s the language of the Obama speeches I once fawned over. But it’s not mine. It’s a role I put on when my New York City AAVE-tinged Spanglish won’t do. Standard English can’t describe the anger I feel when dembow is being blasted outside my apartment at three a.m.. It doesn’t capture the love I have for my boyfriend or the taste of good food.
I’ve tried my best to detach articulateness and eloquence from my perception of intelligence. In fact, I’m trying to stop being pedantic altogether. I deleted Twitter and stopped reading the New York Times. Seriously, I can’t recommend it enough. Learning about linguistics from a descriptivist perspective gave me a safe space to earnestly reflect on my English and recognize its value. I’m still trying, and, I think, I’ll always try to be authentically smart.
SPRING 2025
Bibliography
Illustrations were done in collaboration with the New Media Artspace at Baruch College. The New Media Artspace is a teaching exhibition space in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College. Housed in the Newman Library, the New Media Artspace showcases curated experimental media and interdisciplinary artworks by international artists, students, alumni, and faculty. Special thanks to docent Dylan Shalmer for creating artwork for this piece.
Visit the New Media Artspace at http://www.newmediartspace.info/