“Language, Culture, and Society” By: Doris Sommer
Doris Sommer’s discussion concerning “Language, Culture, and Society” is a very interesting, yet extremely complex, analysis of the various components of reading, writing and speaking practices, as well as the factors that influence and determine them. Interestingly, Sommer has labeled reading, writing and speaking as being forms of “verbal creativity”. This is what makes Doris Sommer’s presentation worth further discussion; she takes the notion of “text” and further problematizes it by complicating the very idea of language, “correspondence” and communication itself.
The method Sommer uses to accomplish this is to analyze the evolution of bilingualism and monolingualism over time and how the two have been both accepted and rejected by society at varying points in history. She begins her discussion at a place where i think most readers today find ourselves: “The redundancy of a single word that named both language and territory performed a kind of enchanted stability.” In thinking about language in communication, it seems almost second nature to talk about language in this manner, to assign language to a specific place (a particular society and political environment); and after reading “Language, Culture, and Society”, it becomes clear why this ideology can be problematic when dealing with “verbal creativity”.
Her discussion of “Spanglish” as a means of communication for many Mexican-Americans makes this discussion particularly relevant to today’s society and the ways in which culture and society shape language and thought; or, as Herder would argue “language does much more than simply give expression to thought; it determines it.” Now we are gaining an understanding of language as much more than conveying people’s thoughts to one another, but as a means for determining what those thoughts will be.
Bakhtin’s inclusion into Sommer’s discussion made it even more interesting. I thought that Bakhtin’s statements created a way for each of us to question, not only the way we our selves read and understand texts, but the way we understand each other. “Life, Bakhtin observed, occurs in clusters of competing voices, through different registers of one language but also in alien alternatives. Heteroglossia is the word he coined to describe the normally multifarious condition of any one language, because of the variety of social and regional styles that make it more than one. Therefore it is almost impossible for anyone to be truly monolingual.”
