By Bhavnoor Saini
Being born in Punjab, India, has always been a big part of my life. In January 2011, my family and I immigrated to the United States to provide my brother and me with a better life. When administering myself to school, I had to take an “English picture test” because summer break was only two and half months away. They showed me simple images such as vehicles, animals, and so on to decide if I should be moved up or down a grade level. My task was to generally name what the image is; if I am presented with a picture of a 1988 Suzuki Esteem, then all I have to do is say “car”. Not a complete sentence; they don’t even care if I correctly pronounce the word; this was my literacy test.
As I grew up and became proficient in English, I started to forget how to read my native language and couldn’t pronounce most words of the languages correctly. This drove my parents to take action because, in my parent’s eyes, forgetting language meant forgetting culture. My parents started to speak Hindi and Punjabi at home to combat this. This made me again able to understand the languages I had before forgotten. However, this caused me to have an accent as I spoke English.
Having an accent in elementary and middle school made me very embarrassed to speak English and be myself. Some of my friends would bully me and comment on how I spoke. I was also a teen, so none of my peers spoke proper English; instead, they mostly used slang to communicate. Being a brown, nerdy-looking boy and using slang terms with a heavy accent did not allow me to blend into the social environment at school. This resulted in me not being able to showcase my true identity to people outside of my home: I wanted to use slang terms, I wanted to speak my mind to my friends, and I wanted to be able to defend myself in a dispute instead of staying quiet to save myself from the embarrassment of having others to hear me speak.
I eventually had enough and wanted to express myself to my peers. I started raising my hand in class to answer questions and participate in small group discussions. After finally socializing with other people, I finally started making friends. I would hang out with them all day, and they helped me slowly lose my accent. I eventually no longer had an accent in high school and wasn’t socially awkward anymore.
Years later, after prolonged exposure to multiple languages, I no longer had an accent in my voice, and I could speak and understand English, Hindi, and Punjabi. I now use slang terms to communicate with my friends, use professional diction when speaking with people of high standards (teachers, bosses, etc.), and communicate with my family using our cultural languages. I can now confidently reveal my identity when communicating with different audiences.
All right, now let’s focus on how me being Punjabi still affects my life today. I’ve already established how I use code-switching to communicate to different audiences, but now I want to talk about how I use code meshing. In middle school, everyone was assigned a writing project in which we had to discuss why it is essential to keep practicing your native language even if you move to another country where your native language is obsolete. When I looked into the grade book to view my grade for the project, I was shocked that I got a B.
After a few days, the papers were handed back, and I lost five or six points on syntax and grammar, but what shocked me the most was that I lost the most points because I wrote a Hindi word: “नमस्ते.” This word translates to “namaste” in English writing, aka hello. I lost points because I used a foreign language to emphasize my writing for a writing assignment regarding foreign language. This problem can be associated with translingualism, and as said by a profound author, “For example, when we realize that literacy is performative, we have to ask if we should judge the text based on how it is constructed or what it does” (Canagarjah 152). The author states that when a piece of literature or writing is done through purposeful artistic performance, should it be judged by its grammatical constructs or its effectiveness in stressing the author’s point.
In my defense, I used a straightforward phrase, which everyone is accustomed to but written in a different language, to emphasize my writing. However, because the teacher refused to accept or acknowledge its effectiveness, I received poor judgment on my writing. After explaining my reasoning for my actions, I got the points back, but this demonstrates that not acknowledging translingualism in writing can cause a bias between different readers.
Furthermore, the English language is very choppy compared to Punjabi. What I mean by this is that the English language requires a lot less speaking or writing to communicate a big, long, detailed message. For example, if you translate “hello” to Punjabi, you’d get “ਸਤ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ” or “Sata srī akāla” in English writing.
Another reason I lost points on my middle school native language writing project was because I used run-on sentences. I agree that using run-on sentences is inappropriate in English literature and writing due to syntax rules embedded in the English language. This reminds me of another quote from the same author, “We must also note that negotiated literacy involves redefining constructs such as coherence, error, and rhetorical effectiveness” (Canagarjah 152). The author states that it is ok to negotiate specific language methods for the writer’s coherent benefit. Thus, I believe it makes perfect sense to include a few run-on sentences because it helps me relate my influence from my native language in my writing. After explaining this to the teacher, she did not budge and refused to give me back my points because, according to her, it is not grammatically correct to include such errors in writing. This example further emphasizes my point on bias between readers as they decide to consider what factors are more important than others in writing.
To conclude, I would like to mention another quote from the same author, “Writing is not itself constitutive of meaning but provides the resources for the construction of meaning” (Canagarjah 130). I have already mentioned how certain creative decisions in writing can make the conviction and emphasis of one’s writing decrease significantly: in my case this was using words from a different language and run-on sentences. Now, I would like to mention that because some readers refuse to accept certain styles and decisions in writing, the meaning of the text to them is never fully understood.
To me, my decisions in my language literacy paper aided the meaning of my writing significantly. However, because the teacher never acknowledged my decisions in the first place, she was never able to understand the complete emphasis of my claims. This is why being able to understand and accept different decisions in writing is critical, because the author cannot cater to the demands of every reader to help them understand the message. The writer can only make statements that the reader should be able to understand from the writing. Obviously, not everyone can understand what someone else is saying but being accepting of the author’s decision in their writing can definitely guide them to the author’s message.