Nobody Mean More To Me Than You And The Future Life Of Willie Jordan Essay

From reading June Jordan’s text, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You, and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” the students’ decision to write in Black English regarding the circumstances of Reginald Jordan’s death is something I can indirectly relate to. But before I get into that, let’s go over the several advantages and disadvantages of writing in this form of english that deviates greatly from the normalities of Standard English. The main issue in writing about Reginald Jordan’s death in Black English is that the general public won’t have much of an understanding of what is being discussed because the way the preface is written in Black English) also results in the lack of publicity in the media. But in a way, writing in Black English serves …show more content…
Besides the rich history, diverse cultures, the beautiful sights, beaches, volcanoes and such, I am sure most mainlanders have no idea what pidgin is. Just as Black English is used primarily by those in the Black communities, Pidgin is a language most of the people that live in Hawai’i use to communicate with another. We can go from typing and speaking in professional manner, to all of sudden speaking pidgin to our close friends and family. You could say Pidgin is a way of life. The way Pidgin came about was during the Sugar Plantation era when people from all around the world (i.e. The Philippines, Japan, China, Portugal, Korea, etc) came to work on the islands harvesting the sugar canes. One problem that came as a result of all these diverse cultures was the great language barrier. Nobody could understand each other! So somehow they managed to develop a form of communication involving words from their own languages and combining it with one another through the Hawaiian and English language. Yes, it sounds very complicated just trying to explain it but in the end it managed to work so people from the Philippines could now communicate with those from Japan while working on the plantations. This form of communication would become known as Pidgin. I’m not sure how Black English originated and developed, but Pidgin had a great influence on the future generations, especially …show more content…
Just as the students reacted to the way the book was written utilizing Black English, my classmates had a fairly similar reaction when reading Mark Twain’s literary great, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although, I had a totally different reaction. The reason for classmates’ disdain of this novel was due to Mark Twain’s usage of dialects. They had a really hard time understanding what was happening, especially when the characters “spoke.” My friends have even told me they downright stopped reading or hated the novel even more when the character, Jim the slave, makes his grand appearance. Due to his thick southern accent, which in part is one of the things that made this book quite controversial during its era, it was was very difficult for most of us to understand what he was trying to say. But while most of classmates showed a great aversion to his dialect, I loved it! The way Mark Twain was able to give each character their own tendencies and dialect of speaking, made them much realer to me. I would 've definitely had an easier time understanding what was going on if Mark Twain chose to wrote in the “good old” standard english, but that would have been no fun at all and I am sure that was the last thought he had when writing this novel. Incorporating dialects into the character 's’ manner of speech