How language can include/exclude, represent or misrepresent?
I think language is an extremely powerful tool that we have been given and in my opinion, the more languages you know, the more powerful you are. During the video we saw different people with different opinions about language. One thing that really went against my views was the french government and how they’re trying to eradicate other languages such as Basque or Occitan. We had a mini discussion about what we thought about it and what were the advantages and disadvantages which were that France would become a very plain country and maybe the economy would suffer and all the other cultures would be gone. So in my opinion, this is an example of languages being excluded. One thing they mentioned which really bothered me was that kids were being beat up if they spoke Occitan.
Something else interesting that they mentioned in the video was the call center. They were using people who had the regular, most common accent in that country to try and help a customer, but if there was a problem, someone with a strong British(?) accent would be considered as authoritative and would be quite effective in calming a customer down and coming to a resolution. I think this is about representing/misrepresenting but for a good cause because if the accent of the people calmed the customers down, the satisfaction rate is higher which is really good for the customer and the call center.
Final Thoughts / Takeaways
An interesting thought that I took away from this video was that people who speak a different language think a different way from other language speakers. For example a Russian speaker thinks a different way than a Malay speaker. I found this theory to be really interesting because it made me think about people that are bilingual and in our generation there are even more bilingual people than before so I wonder if because of that there might be events caused by the different mindsets.