Tongues of Heaven Documentary

    This documentary was eye opening for several reasons as I saw the language and communication struggles these people had that I have never even thought about. For me, being born and living in the United States all my life, I have always been lucky enough to be speaking the primary and most widely known language in any environment I have ever been in. Moreover, I have never had the chance to travel outside of the country, so I have never been in a situation where the language I know was not being spoken. Watching this documentary made me realize language and ease of communication is something I have taken for granted. To these people in the documentary, language means a whole lot and with their native tongue they get "a sense of belonging and importance" when their language is spoken, according to one 20-year old girl interviewed.

    Unfortunately, with so many different languages across the different villages and regions throughout these Caribbean Islands, some of these languages start to phase out and go away all together. The one girl believed her generation might be the last to carry the language she grew up speaking. With all the colonizing and moving of people onto these islands, with their languages, it is often the indigenous people who have their native languages lost in the shuffle. Like one of the older men said in the documentary, "you can imitate culture, but you can't imitate language." This goes to show, while it might still look and even feel like home, it does not sound like home when the language these people have spoken is no longer normal. Their language often time goes back to their roots, along with their familial ties, which seem to also be of upmost importance to many of these people. The documentary showed this first hand when one woman while working said, "Everything I do with these hands, I do because my family has given me the opportunity." This shows just how appreciative and important family is to the people on these islands. As stated in the documentary, it is hard to mandate and have a true, universal or widely known language in these regions because of how many little villages can be spread out all over the place. I think this may also happen in part because of the lack of a centralized governing body for schooling for these places. It seems that parts of these areas are overlooked or forgotten about, which is sad.

-cs

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