I took this picture around my job in Fresh Pond RD. Im not too sure about what language is it but since the area is predominantly Albanian and polish, it has to be one or the other. I took this picture because I felt like it was representative of the people in that area.
Author: Christopher Diaz
Linguistic Background (Christopher Diaz)
When it comes to my linguistic background, I can speak, read and write English and Spanish fluently. When I was smaller, I didn’t know how to speak Spanish at all. Not even one word. I was able to learn it in my time living in the Dominican Republic. Interestingly enough, people tell me that when I speak Spanish, they don’t hear any accent at all. They would expect for me to speak Spanish with some sort of American accent since my first language is English but according to them I don’t. I live by myself so the I speak English mostly at home but when I’m at my mother’s house in DR or my aunt’s house then I speak Spanish all the time. When I was living in DR, since I spoke mostly Spanish, my English was starting to fade a little bit. I remember that when my dad used to tell me things in English, I would answer him in Spanish and that would get him upset because he didn’t want my English to fade. Now that I have been living here for a long time, my Spanish has developed a bit of an accent and certain things that were east for me to say back then, now I get a little tongue tied or I just say it in English instead. What I like about my Spanish is that when I speak it, people automatically know where im from. I feel stronger and closer to my Dominican roots than my American so it makes me feel happy that my second language can be traced to my country. Nowadays, when my mother speaks to me in Spanish, I answer her in English most of the time.