Language autobiography example

How to write a linguistic autobiography
Linguistic autobiography assignment
This being an autobiography, the speaker of the book, the “I,” is a language; a language whose stories and essays tumble out into the page.

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The Autobiography of a Language

April 3, 2024

First of all; I will definitely come back to this again, and again, and again, and again.
This book looks upon itself and its own language in a third perspective so much that it grounds you back to where you are supposed to be: here.

“In physics a daughter is a nuclide formed by the radioactive decay of a mother. I assumed I was a bad daughter because I wasn't a good one. My belief must have been rooted in a language problem: the inherent binary implied in the adjective " good." I believed I was a bad daughter because becoming my own person came at the expense of my mother's demise.”

What a thing to twist the autobiography of language to make it what language is at its core: the mother tongue of an individual, the personal association of language so closely tied with the identity.

“Why think feelings instead of simply feeling them? It produces "bad writing," a kind of prose that obfuscates the uncertainties of process by way of neatly tied narratives.”

Not only have I quoted this ever since I read it but I’ve also repeated it

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I wrote the following linguistic autobiography in the Fall of 2012 as a reflective task for the linguistic seminar “Principles of Language Learning and Teaching” taught by Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl.

I am from Málaga, Spain, and my native language is Spanish. I began learning English in primary school and continued through high school. The main focus of the classroom was grammar study with priority given to reading and writing. I was not the best student back then, but English was the subject I enjoyed most. I have an aunt who lives in Massachusetts, and I spent a month with her and her family in the States at age 12. For the next few years I continued to visit them during the summer and while I was able to understand English, I was reticent to actually speak it except when needed. I also took Latin for two years (which I really enjoyed but didn´t truly remember when I had to take my PhD required Latin course two summers ago). I also wanted to take French in high school, but the school decided that my overall grades were not good enough and that I should take

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The Autobiography of a Language

Emanuel Carnevali's Italian/American Writing

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Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Translating Childhood, Decoding America

2. The Newcomer and the Splendid Commonplace: Using English as a Second Language

3. Representing Italy in America

4. A Language for Bazzano: An Italian American Returns Home

5. Between the Atlantic and Oblivion: Carnevali in the 1930s

Conclusion: Emanuel Carnevali in the 21st Century

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Explores the links between language, cultural identity, and creativity through the works of Emanuel Carnevali, one of the first Italian American authors to attain literary recognition.

The Autobiography of a Language is an exploration of the deep and powerful ties between language and identity, focusing on an Italian American author and addressing global themes of modern writing. This is the first extensive, book-length work on Emanuel Carnevali (1897–1942), the first Italian American to attain literary recognition. It is a study on how an Italian immigrant to New York