Language and Community

In the article “Achieving Community” by Suresh Canagarajah, the author describe her experience and discovery in her survey field trip to Toronto. In the beginning of the field trip, she was shock to saw many Tamils pretend they don’t speak Tamil even though the author started the conversation with Tamil.

After further researching, Canagarajah found that the reason why those Tamils pretend not knowing Tamil is that they don’t want people assume that they belong to the Tamil community and apply any stereotypes to them. Instead of being put in any community because of some “purported social” or “linguistics features”, those Tamils want freedom to choose and achieve their own community.

“Some teenagers hang out mostly with South Asians as they share many concerns and struggles together and enjoy a pan-Asian community; families in the inner city told me that they enjoyed wonderful relationship with the Black families in their neighborhood as “they understand what it means to be discriminated” ; some Christian families said they meet for weekly home group meetings with the anglo members of their church for deep and meaningful fellowship.” After seeing those examples of how people bond with each other, Canagarajah understand that she should not treat the Tamil “community” as “monolithic” and “homogeneous.” Even though they share the same mother language, they have different personalities, struggles, experience, religions, interests, etc. And people can achieve the community with anything they share or want to share.

It reminds me of a time when I was in high school. It was in a P.E. class and we need to divide people into four groups to play volleyball. As general time, I grouped with other 3 Asian friends and we need one more person. We quickly notice there is another Asian girl in our class and we though she might willing to play with us. Unexpectedly, she rejected us and said, “I don’t want to always stay with Asian people. I want to be more diverse and have various communities.”