Welcome to my first blog post! My name is Albena, and I felt that much of Beyond Language Difference in Writing: Investigating Complex and Equitable Language Practices by Cristina Sánchez-Martín resonated with some of my personal experiences as a bilingual first-generation immigrant.

I was born in Bulgaria, my parents immigrated to America with me when I was two, and had my younger sister three years later. With my parents, sister, and I all having different experience with the Bulgarian language, as a bilingual family, the idea of "code meshing" and "translingual practices" reminded me of how my family speaks among ourselves in our home. The essay quotes "code meshing" as a "mix of grammatical structures" between English and another language. This reminds me of how we will say an English word with a Bulgarian conjugation at the end, combining the two languages to make up words. At home, my parents tend to only speak to each other in Bulgarian. They mix Bulgarian words with English ones when speaking to my sister and I, and my sister and I at this point pretty much explicitly only reply in English. This illustrates a kind of gradual blend of Bulgarian and English that ranges from full Bulgarian to full English with a mix of both in between. This demonstrates how much a language can change and still be understood and functional between communities, despite each member of the community speaking in their own translingual code-meshing of the language.

Monolingual expectations of language are non-expansive, non-inclusive, and reek of cultural ignorance and minority oppression. When differences of speech are used as a way to divide people, where one is upheld to be the "standard" we have to ask ourselves who is most accessible to the standard, and whether that reinforces segregation. In the case of English, when only white academic English is considered "appropriate," this results in the othering of different communities, ultimately dividing a society that is capable of coexisting among the inevitable language variations that arise in a multi-cultural nation.

Lastly, this essay reminded me of the book, White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, which explores the lives of two immigrant families, the lives of their immigrant friends, and how they face the pressures of assimilating and accommodating to English standards as they grow up in London, England. The book explores the impacts of media, social standards, language barriers, and culture shock. The fight against accommodating to white academic standards in this essay is a theme in the book pictured on the left.