Communitcation Hybrid
Alexander Asparuhov
Who? Who decides? Why can’t we speak our own language, the language that we have been hearing since we first made our weak steps into the rest of our lives. Fourteen years of learning, understanding and brainwashing. And what is the result? I am now sixteen, never lived anywhere else than my home country, and I am ashamed, ashamed to say that I am illiterate in my mother tongue.. I feel left behind and forgotten. Been made fun of and criticized, let me just add… че ми е трудно да се изкажа(it is hard for me to speak) without adding english into my sentences. This imperialistic limited language which dictates and dominates the way society is perceived has poisoned the identity of the students in my institution.
We, the natives, were separated and split, cast away from the others. And then later told that we “do not integrate ourselves into the community”, “ that we need to be more social and open”. How? How do they, the institution as a whole, how do they know what we do? Crammed and pushed into a room, forced to think of ways to unify ourselves with “them”. As if the non-natives are a higher, a more pure race. And what are we? According to the social parameters which we don’t fit in, we are a load that needs unloading, like buzzing flies “with no prospects for life”. “Unmotivated, disrespectful, self involved and narcissistic.” Is this how we present ourselves? How do they figure?
How are we “not involved into society?” We involve in media, in nature and ecology, in politics, edinburgh programs and political protests and stances, and “it is not enough” they say. What is there credibility, why is this “noble” institution creating a false sense of empowerment over us? What is the benefit? Stripping us of choice, personality, freedom? Is this what their core values mandate, for them to make us feel suppressed? It is rare a week goes by without any form of criticism or “maybe you should try this” because of course, “it will help you integrate into your community”.
The last two paragraphs might not have made sense to you, and I don’t expect you to understand me, after all you are a foreigner and I haven’t yet integrated myself into “your” community. You migrate, you choose to be here, in this living beauty, this bouquet of mountains, rivers and lakes, of culture and diversification. We the natives try, but like language, it separates people and puts them into unified groups not because of personal preferences, but because personal expression can be achieved. A trend, actually more of a phenomenon that occurs, in this tightly wrapped community of people is that when the code-switching between Bulgarian and English occur, there is a switch in personalities and moods as well. I do not know if you can relate, but when you express yourself to others with the same mother tongue as you, and you speak in English, do you not feel awkward? Do you, not feel as if what you are saying is not received on the same level as it would in your own special language? Yes. Language does set us all apart and we all separate because of language. But we more so separate based on view,
ethics, moral stances and on the way we follow to cultural biases. And this is where language is no longer the problem, it is our own, personal, self-developed, interests. A gymnast with a gamer, a musician with a mathematician, and a writer with a biologist, these interests do not mix naturally. Nor in free opened life of adults, nor in the small, contained and forced community of emotionally apt teens.
This institutional dictatorship makes us, the natives, feel guilty that because of different views we share among ourselves, and is the point? To self-doubt and question if what you are being taught at home wrong? The enforcers of the worldwide lingua franca called English do not understand the magnitude of forcing a nation, a race, a group and even a gang to speak in a certain way. They are careless, narcissistic people who can not open and grasp the idea of a sundry ways of expression and thought. But so it has to reflect on us? Yes. It has, it will, and there is no one who cares enough to change the way the institution shapes our perceptions wrongly. After so many years, decades of brain and mind manipulation there is no one who wants to regain their true identity back, by fighting what the institution enforces.
There are all these unanswered questions not because I don’t have an answer, but because of the split between the set beliefs of the institution and family at home have created a tear in my moral stance in society, and this is what the institution wants to achieve? Не е ли ironic the last part?
