TED Talk: Chamamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story Theres nothing that brings more frustration and

disappointment, yet highlights the flaws of society, as the continuous judgment of a foreign land that is only seen with one side of the story: the negative one. The biased outlook that the media portrays is spread and reinforced through written and spoken language. This sole viewpoint becomes the basis for the struggle that arises between creating stereotypes about a culture versus reality. This class has enabled me to understand the power that language has and this speech by Chamamanda Adichie highlights how our thoughts and beliefs are not only impacted by spoken language but are also impacted by written language. At four years of age, a primal stage in the development of the axiom between language, thought, and culture, Adichie began to read (Ahearn 2012: 70). The kinds of books she read were not representative of her own culture though. They portrayed children with blue eyes and fair skin that played in the snow, ate apples, and talked about the weather. When she was older, she discovered African books which initiated a mental-shift. The books represented the ability for people like her with chocolate hair and skin to be able to exist in literature as well (Adichie 2009). The power of reading and writing about things she recognized rather than things of the unknown gave her the power to use language to strengthen her own linguistic repertoire by constructing a language that is most useful for [her] needs (Ochs and Schieffelin 1995:87-88). Language itself became a social action where the diglossia of the English languages high status was destroyed (Ahearn 2012: 129:143). The language ideologies that she held to be true at a younger age was built by childhood books that only showed a single-sided story, where there was no diversity of culture, society, or race (Ahearn 2012: 20). A diversity that is nonexistent in todays society in the stage that the media establishes by setting an agenda that benefits them politically and financially but does not benefit the subject of

their speech. The media plays a role in the geopolitics involved in language by using an official language and with its pragmatics applying negative conations regarding a specific location or society, so that the mass population then associates this stereotypical view with the culture/society itself by only looking at that single-sided biased story (Ahearn 2012: 12:22:123). This concept was something that Adichie realized when she traveled to the United States and her roommate felt automatic pity simply because she was from Africa. Her roommate did not think that Africa was filled with beautiful people but simply saw it as a world filled with AIDS and death. Her literature professor even told her that her stories were not authentically African because her characters were not suffering but were a lot like him they were not starving, therefore not African enough (2009). His personal language ideologies became a barrier to tell another side of the story of the African people that is not commonly spoken of. The way that society has constructed itself though language and culture are part of a preexisting reality that are the product of individual humans words and actions (Ahearn 2012: 23). Everything we hear, say, read, or even see is based on language that creates predispositions for each thought that weve had as a child or as an adult, which then shapes our unique culture (Ahearn 2012: 65). At the end of the day, language holds the power to transform and reconstruct everything we know and even reconstruct our past. Listening to this TED talk after taking this course was not the same experience I would have had a couple of months back. I wouldnt have appreciated the way that language influences what happens around us and what we say or do during the different stages of our lives. Language impacts our thoughts in a way that makes other cultures and societies appear to have a greater or lower status, so by listening to a single story we risk loosing the knowledge that comes with each culture, language, and society. In the transidiomatic society we live in, as technology advances and our world becomes globalized, it will become essential to

understand the uniqueness and the beauty of each culture, and to look past that single sided negative story (Jacquemet 2005: 264-265). Language is non-neutral but we have the power to reconfigure and replace the hierarchy in place and create a shift towards a more open society that appreciates diversity (Ahearn 2012: 283:290).

References Adichie, Chamamanda. (2009) The danger of a single story. TEDGlobal2009. Online video, http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html?quote= 558, accessed April 17,2013 Ahearn, Laura. (2012) Living Language. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell Jacquemet, Marco. (2005) Transidiomatic practices: language and power in the age of globalization. Language and communication, pp. 264-265 Ochs, Elinor and Schieffelin, Bambi. (1995) The impact of language socialization on grammatical development. In Fetcher, P. and MacWhinney, B. (eds.), The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 87-88