Kathy Park Hong - May 20, Iyengar II & I

From Dance Dance Revolution, a poem-sequence that mixes a little science fiction with social/historical consciousness. The whole thing made me think. And even review how my own use and views about language, how language can be used to define status, even by the most well-meaning.

FOREWORD

In the Desert, the language is an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects imported into this city, a rapidly evolving lingua franca. The language, while borrowing the inner structures of English grammar, also borrows from existing and extinct English dialects. Here, new faces pour in and civilian accents morph so quickly that their accents betray who they talked to that day rather than their cultural roots. Fluency is also a matter of opinion. There is no tuning fork to one’s twang…