Bridging our Learning Worlds (BOLW) Ep.10 | Who Gets to Speak What Language?

What does a Yorùbá speaker look like? An ordinary comment I heard while eating made me stop and think about why are we sometimes surprised by the languages people speak? What assumptions do we make based on someone's appearance, education, social position, or where we think they have been? In Episode 10 of Bridging Our Learning Worlds, I reflect on who gets imagined as belonging to particular languages and what happens when people do not fit those expectations. I also return to a question from Episode 8 about language as ẹ̀bùn, a gift. If families and communities give us languages, what happens when we carry those gifts into the wider Agbolé? Are they welcomed? Questioned? Rejected? Or judged according to who we are expected to be? And sometimes, the expectations work in the other direction like what are you supposed to sound or look like after living somewhere else? Probably the deeper question is not simply, who speaks what language but who decided what a speaker of a language is supposed to look or sound like? I would love to hear your experiences. Have you ever surprised someone simply by speaking a language they did not expect from you? Ordinary moments. Extraordinary lessons. Bridging our learning worlds. #BridgingOurLearningWorlds #BOLW #Language #Yoruba #Multilingualism #LanguageAndIdentity