An Application

by Kevin Cenna

Throughout the article, presented to us in our textbook A First Look at Communication Theory, by E.M. Griffin, I found myself wondering if he was going to expand his theory any further. To summarize Mr. Gerry Philipsen (the author of this theory), speech codes are the ways in which we speak, regarding a group of people. Mr. Philipsen did a study in which he found that people spoke in different patterns of language in one geographical area, compared to a different geographical area.

I would have to say that I thought this a very interesting study and found the article going by very quickly as I read. I personally never would have thought to make a study out of how people talk. To me, it's just been something that I do. I know that if Mr. Philipsen followed me on a trip to see all of my friends, he could only have one conclusion: "the subject tries to fit into every different group by changing his speech code." I enjoy trying to figure out how different kinds of people talk, different classes of people, different races, and different intelligence levels. Let's be honest, some people are "a little bit loose in the noodle". On the other hand, everyone has met someone who is too smart for Mensa. It's a fact of life. Going to both Catholic and public schools, I have seen many different walks of life, and noticed that those who were obviously not as smart as "the norm" talked in a different manner in which I talked with my friends, and the smarter people talked with each other. Their vocabulary was much more limited, but the words they did use, had more meanings than the smarter people. This became evident to me around the sixth grade. Sometimes, I would enjoy talking to those who I knew weren't as smart as I am, to give my brain a rest, and to find out what new ways they used their words. Other times I enjoyed talking to the smarter people to stretch my brain and educate myself.

While I was reading this article, and when I finished, I began to reflect on my life, and if this study could have possibly applied to me. And after some debating, I decided that it does. But not necessarily in the manner that Mr. Philipsen would've, perhaps, believed. I realized that during my first and only year at my first college, University of Toledo, I talked in a different manner in which I talk to my friends at Ohio University. At University of Toledo, I found myself involved in a few actvities which included a diverse group of people. Everyone in that group talked in their own, streamlined way, and I find myself reverting to that speech code when I go back and visit Toledo. Instead of a specific example to point to, the best way to describe the dialect, was what we would think of as an "inner-city" dialect. The ends of words are drawn out, or not said. Multiple words are contracted to form one word, "knowhatimean". When I transfered to Ohio University, since I knew a lot of people from high school, I found myself talking the way I did in high school, not the way I was talking at Toledo. Once I started to meet new people here at Ohio University, I began to speak in a completely new manner.

To give you an example, my roommate and I can have a complete conversation using the word "dof-novin". Ok, I know it's not a word, but the both of us understand what it means, and, depending on the intonation of the voice, what it implies. We use it as an exclamation instead of "oh my goodness!", or, we can use it instead of "that sucks". There are many other words that we use that aren't really words, but we understand their meaning.

I wasn't the only one who noticed these changes in speech code. Every time I visited home over breaks, my mother commented on the fact that I was talking differently. I think she realized that I was talking differently, but she couldn't put her finger on what it was. I had been changing the usage of my words, and also the rate at which I was speaking.

Through the learning of people's different speech codes, I have learned to accept, like and understand more people. Being able to almost put myself in the other person's shoes and try to figure out where they are coming from, and understand them, has made for more than one interesting conversation. Doing this has been like a breath of fresh air, and allows me to learn something new every day.



Citations
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This page was last updated by Kevin Cenna on Febuary 2, 2000.