Making a Speech Community
I work at American Eagle Outfitters. My managers always say that I have good customer interaction skills, since I often get good feedback about being knowledgeable about our products, and help them shop around, so I am normally in the fitting rooms talking with customers. I’ve often mentioned in class that I become frustrated with my co-workers when helping people who do not have a good grasp of English. Often, customers think that I have Latin or South East Asian origins (all of the time), based on my appearance. Since I learned speaking Spanish first and speak Italian, for customers speaking Spanish, I try to communicate and help them. This is usually the first indicator of how people interact with me, since after hearing me say their name, they hear my accent and assume that I am Latina. This happened to me over the weekend when a Peruvian woman named Frida came into the fitting rooms. Upon introducing myself, she immediately smiled and replied, “Oh! Tu hablas espanol?”, to which I replied in Spanish, “No, mas, peudo hablar italiano.” She then said, “Oh! Davvero? Abitavo in Italia con mio marito.” Once she explained that, I immediately began speaking only Italian with her, explaining our promotions going on for the weekend. My manager walked over, and seemed stunned to see me actually having a conversation in another language, since she has never heard me speak Italian. I helped Frida and her husband checkout, and we continued speaking in Italian. They told me that he had a fellowship in Verona, so they lived there for two years, and they even knew the city where I used to live. My manager was so impressed that she put me on the ‘Wall of Awesome’ (I got 2 stickers!), because she said that the fact that I could communicate with them in another language not only added to their shopping experience, but it was something that no one else could do, saying that I ‘…broke the bilingual barrier’. My interaction with Frida and her husband created a mini-speech network in the store, since we were speaking a language that no one else could understand, but we were also members of various language groups, since she also spoke English and Spanish, and I speak English, fluently. While some could argue that since neither of us have an ethnic Italian background, and that as periphery members of the speech community, we are violating felicity conditions by speaking in Italian, the fact that we both lived in Italy for an extended period of time, immersed in the culture, does give us some allowance to be accepted into the speech community. Personally, my bilingualism allows me to travel in different circles, and I take pride in the time and effort I’ve put in over the years to master my fluency. While I do not, nor will I ever, explicitly identify as ‘Italian’, Italian culture and the language are inherent parts of my own identity. This interaction can also been seen as how my use of another language took away some of the power my managers had while interacting with Frida and her husband. Normally if I am with a customer, my managers will come up to talk to us, and make sure that I discussed what deals were going on with the customer. Because the three of us created a speech network in Italian, both of my managers present were excluded from our conversations because they could not speak the language. Had my manager come up and began speaking in English, it could have changed the dynamic between Frida, her husband, and myself, since we were joking and sharing personal stories about our time in Italy. Thus, in forming speech communities that are distinct from the dominant language being spoken, in this case taking power away from monolingual- English speakers, it gave me more power to communicate with Frida by excluding my managers, who traditionally have authority over me.
