What's Lost When A Language Dies Analysis

Language & Identity Crisis I’m sitting in my living-room with my dad, my head is spinning, and everything that I know as reality is slowly fading away. The TV across from me is slowly becoming unfamiliar and does not quite seem like the TV I had for ten years. Korean shows are blasting from the TV and they suddenly switch into American TV shows, it keeps going back and forth. The memories made at the family dining table are starting to flow away, were those memories in Korean? In English? The old brown ripped couch that I am sitting on is starting to become newer and newer; this is not the couch that has been in my family as long as I remembered. My dad is speaking to me in Korean, then in English, and then in Korean. I cannot understand him,

As written in “What’s Lost when a Language Dies,” by Lane Wallace, “Because language discloses cultural and historical meaning, the loss of language is a loss of that link to the past. Without a link to the past, people in a culture lose a sense of place, purpose and path; one must know where one came from to know where one is going” (Wallace). Wallace is saying language is the bridge that connects one’s past to one’s present and what Wallace wrote is something that I really resonate to. This is because when I lost my language, I did not where I came from and who I was. Middle school, for me, was such a key time for me to finding who I am and what makes me, “Richard.” At the point in my life, I did not speak Korean and as Wallace said I had no link to my past. At the time of my life, I just really wanted to understand where I came from and the key to understanding myself was within my culture, but losing my language made me lose my

Somedays I would feel that I am a Korean-American because I would react in certain ways that a Korean would. For instance, I feel that it is key to be respectful to one another, specifically to people that are my seniors or people that I have professional relationships with. However, some days I would feel American-Korean because regardless of what position one is in, that should not give them the right to treat others with disrespect. Though losing partial linguistic competence in Korean is something that I regret in my life, this exposure of two culture is something I do not regret because of that I gained this hybrid linguistic-communicative competence. As Harriet Ottenheimer explains in “The Anthropology of Language,” Linguistic competence is the ability to speak a language grammatically correct and communicative competence is ability to speak a language in a way that makes one heard and gives empowerment from speaking a language such a way. (Ottenheimer 156-158). I feel as if I have a linguistic-hybrid communicative competence because it is true that I lack the skills to speak Korean, but I can speak in such a way to make my father understand the emotions behind my language and I can also understand his emotions from his unique language. As Ottenheimer said, “Developing communicative competence in a language empowers you in important way. It helps you to