Cultural communication Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Cultural communication - Essay Example iously, the politician was attempting to tap into the cultural code of the working class, less educated sort of people that regularly use the term â€Å"redd up.† Since he was running for local government, he was able to use this very regional term, whereas a politician running for state senate or any higher position wouldn’t dare use this term, especially considering that people outside of this region would have no idea what this term meant. By using this term, the politician was saying, â€Å"hey, look at me, I’m just an ordinary person, not like the typical fancy pants politician that you can’t trust as far as you can throw.† One of my friends told me that he tried very hard to lose his â€Å"eh† that he was used to employ in his speech. His family had just moved from Canada, and one of the first things that the kids in his school noticed was his tendency to end sentences with the word â€Å"eh.† It identified him as an outsider, somebody that did not belong to where he currently was. Being a new comer at a new place was difficult enough for him and he worked very hard on assimilating to the local dialect. Beyond dropping â€Å"eh†, he also worked to reduce the drastically different vowel sounds, he used for words like â€Å"coach.† Especially considering the clique-ish nature of schoolchildren, my friend was trying to fit into the cultural code of his new school and country. The author notices acutely the extent to which his parents struggle with English, when speaking with white people. They seem very strained whenever they have to speak English and hypersensitive to any mistakes they might be making, at least to the five-year-old author. Their inability to speak English fluently places them in a different cultural code form their neighbors. The author has a hard time thinking of Spanish as a language as anything other than what is spoken at home. He refers to it as a â€Å"private† language, a language that is only spoken at home and never in public