Taylor McDougalFollow

Date Collected

Winter 12-3-2018

Place item was collected

Logan, UT

Informant

Michaela Mecham

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Michaela is a college freshman at USU. She is studying Agriculture and is soon temporarily leaving after this semester to serve a mission for the LDS church. She is from Heber Utah and loves her farm. She and I are roommates at Anderson apartments.

Context

I was able to ask Michaela about any secret languages she might have created or used as a child one day as were getting ready in the morning. The conversation was super casual and laid back as I was actually still in bed in our apartment. I like to do my homework in bed so when she walked into our room I was already thinking about the topic and was able to start a conversation with her. She was hesitant at first and didn’t think of anything right off the top of her head but with a moment, she was able to tell her story.

Text

I didn’t really have any secret languages that I spoke when I was a kid but I used to ride on the bus with my friends and we’d do weather watchers and we’d all talk to each other there. One of my friends would speak Japanese and I would speak Spanish and another one of my friends would speak with an English accent and we’d just talk to each other.

Me: did you guys actually know how to speak Japanese and Spanish?

Oh no. no we would just pretend to speak how we thought that other languages sounded and we thought it was really funny like we would just pretend to speak Spanish and we’d pretend to speak Japanese but we didn’t actually know it.

Texture

Michaela told me her story a little hesitantly and fairly quickly, almost in passing. She was somewhat distracted with getting ready for class. This subject didn’t seem to be of most importance to her in the moment but also brought about some laughs and smiles when remembering the past and the ridiculousness of childhood. The conversations was also laid back and relaxed.

Course

ENGL 2200

Instructor

Lynne S. McNeil

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G3: Language

EAD Number

11.1.0.14

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