Originally from Romania, I have been accustomed to hearing multiple languages since I was a child. Until my arrival in the US, I never thought about ordering languages in a particular sequence. While Romanian is my native language—to employ the US parlance—English has been my writing language, French is my foreign language, and Latin is my ancestors’ language. The latter language—“the most alive dead language” as a colleague would say—has been instilled and drilled in my literacy education year after year. The rhetorical function of each language cannot be subsumed under first, second, or third category. These languages are richly interactive…
Author: Jacki Fiscus
Ligia Mihut
Jacki is a graduate student at the University of Washington. She is primarily interested in multimodal composition, translingualism, and discourse analysis.