1st Person's narrative on language

While I was reading this article called "9 Ideas about language" by Harvey A. Daniels, the thought of language and it's development became clear to me. Language is something we speak every day but we never sit down to actually analyze the development and unique styles it has taken over the years. I couldn't help but think of my own developmental stages concerning my native language and how difficult it was for me to transition everything I have ever known from my native tongue to that of some one else’s. I was born in Ghana west Africa and over there the languages are like candy, different, interesting, and no one is like the other, however they can all be understood by the natives who live there. Just like how candy may be different we can all come to one conclusion about it once we taste it; which is it is sweet.

As a child my home was always filled with people, family, friends, strangers who will soon become friends of the family, and regardless of what language they spoke we all understood each other. Like Daniels mentioned in the article (pg.20) language is imitated by children, and the first place it's learned is at the place where they often are, which is the home. Having many people in my home made it very easy for me to speak, and learn different African dialects with out ever feeling over whelmed. However when I first came to this country I was faced with a new challenge, the challenges of learning verbs, adverbs, prefixes, suffixes, adjectives and much, much more.

It became very overwhelming, so much that I had to repeat a grade level in school. However the idea of a child learning or should I say imitating language in his or her home is definitely supported by me. With every chance I got my mother would turn on the home television (which had became my best friend) and I would watch educational television; doing so my english improved ten fold. Another idea or topic spoken about in the article was the importance of environment, Daniels used an example of Eskimos having different terminology for snow because they are surrounded by it.

However in Chicago the basic terms like sleet, snow, slush are used because it's not common out there to see that much snow(pg.31). Well the thing was, in Ghana where I grew up the weather was normally hot, so their were numerous terminologies for heat, however here in the United States their is summer, spring, and heat. This made things kind of difficult but I'm glad that I leared what I leared in this new language spoken world wide.