My family has had the hugest/largest impact on my idiolect. With my parents i will often code switch between Gujarati and English. For example when coming home from school my mother will ask me “school kaasi thi?”(how was school) and “school mein kya kiya” (what did you do in school today). I would respond my say “school was okay” notice how I responded in English. There are many reasons why I code witch at home. Firstly I would speak to my parents Gujarati to show respect where as having a older brother i would not code switch and speak in slang (English). Also if i was to visit to my country to visit my relatives I would be able to communicate with them and will not feel excluded when they are having discussion of some sort and this will not make me feel like a foreigner.
However in different situations i would not code switch such as being at school. It’s not that I’m embarrassed of talking in my culture i will be very apprehensive to speak as I am very self conscious of what other people will think and this will lead to me being paranoid.
Subsequently many adults find it hard/difficult to basically understand what we are saying, misinterpretation often happens as a result of slang words having double meanings which can lead to awkward and misleading conversations with the elder generation which also can generate ill feeling and therefore think to be disrespectful.
Although I may use slang while conversing with my friends I tend not to use it while speaking to someone older than me as it is seen as respect to speak to an adult in a formal and sometimes sincere attitude whereas while speaking to someone of my own age I often use different styles of slang that would not be acceptable if I was to talk my parents, this type of speech is casual talk which comes naturally and is carried out between me and my friends; talking to an adult or an older person would not be the same style as it would be a more formal tone.
To complete the project i took a conversation with one of my friends and recorded a transcript of how I would normally speak, based on my transcript I found that I used quite a lot of slang for instance lingo such as “omg, dem” and also I started to see that a was repeating words like “like” quite often; in addition to this I discovered that while talking about something I tended to go over things in detail which I had failed to notice beforehand.
My speech and attitude during the transcript gave the notion that I was feeling happy and content, hence the fact I was with somebody I knew well and someone who had spoken to on a daily basis; Then again if I had been speaking to an older person or a person who I did not know it would have been spoken in a much more formal tone excluding slang and fillers such as “ummm and hmmm”.
After analysing my transcript I had with a friend I questioned many different things about my idiolect that I had never thought about before. For example when speaking I noticed that I tend to shorten words such as “ma” instead of my I also discovered that I over exaggerate on things that are quite simple to get my point across for instance in the transcript when I said “nothing, I'm sooooo bored all I did was go Tesco today… OMG”.
During the transcript I also discovered that speaking in different ways e.g. adapting the tone of your voice and body language can portray something totally different and can affect different kinds of people depending on their relationship with you, status or age. The person that I spoke to felt that I spoke appropriately as we are the same age and share similar status so he was used to the way I spoke.
Speech can be interpreting in different ways so people can interpret my speech as to how it sounds and not what I have said although this comes naturally this is something that I know now and I can improve on.
In all conclusions I have discovered the variety of my own unique idiolect, as well as noticing how this can be affected by the environment and its surroundings so I therefore understand how slang and literature varies in different countries. Regardless of the criticism made by others, I think that I have a unique, diverse and explicable idiolect which is versatile permitting me to communicate with an array of different people.
As a result of this I have developed an outlook on how to speak in certain situations with different types of people, an understanding of the ways the English language is always evolving and the different levels of formality used in texts. I have created opinions on what kind of idiolect is suitable for particular situations, and I have adjusted this in hope that in the upcoming future people can feel that I can communicate and converse appropriately with then and on their level to make them feel content involved during any conversation.