3 ways to speak English | Jamila Lyiscott www.youtube.com
The spoken word poem "3 Ways To Speak English" gives a sense of power to the author, Jamila Lyiscott, for her ability to navigate the world in the three dialects that are truest to her, and exuding the meaning of articulation in relevance to these dialects making them respectable and formal in their own unique way. In her spoken word, she declares, "That's why I put "trilingual" on my last job application. I can help to diversify your consumer market is all I wanted them to know". To her, the word "Hello" is as equal in value "what's good" and as mannerly as "whatagwan".
It is not a matter of articulating in eurocentric English, but a matter of being able to convey messages that can be delivered to many audiences. Lyiscott claims to speak broken English such as ebonics and Patois so that the "perfusing gashes" awaken our consciousness about the reality that "our current state is not a mystery."
She perceives the quick switching of jargon to be a skill rather than a hindrance, and that the notion that the eurocentric tongue takes the highest status in the linguistic hierarchy, or the notion that there is a hierarchy at all, is not only incorrect but a justification to communicate in her "broken" language to remind the world of her Afrocentric culture. The history that was diminished in the process of colonizing her people is rooted in her deconstructed words, the strange emphasis on the certain vowels that she speaks, and the neglect of subject-verb agreements. Her speech is an approach to pay homage to her ancestors and restore the culture that they left behind.
Here's a little background on the history that she is speaking of:
Slaves dispersed throughout several southern colonies in America were forced to discard the many West African languages they took with them and pick up English. The varieties of English they spoke while on their plantations began this idea of AAVE, or African American Vernacular English.
AAVE is continuously gaining new features that, instead of assimilating it into other dialects, distinguish it further and is growing to be the home dialect of ethnic groups other than African Americans, such as Latinos, and might even be drifting to be an urban dialect with no relation to any particular ethnic group. In a sense, these dialects have become a language in itself.
