[Client’s Name]
[Class Name]
Language is one of the most, if not the most, important tool we have when communicating with each other. People talk and use different vocabulary when they talk to their siblings, their co-workers, or their friends. They also act different around them and the study of the behavior of a specific cultural group is called ethnography. Ethnography is “a qualitative research design aimed at exploring cultural phenomena. The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group” (Gee 2003). There are many reports of ethnographies around the world and this data is important to understanding differences between social and cultural phenomenon. Such types of groups are called discourse communities. Discourse communities are not just random groups of people, but they are specific cultural or social groups that the ethnography studies report on. The type of discourse community that I am a part of and that I am going to be describing in this paper are cancer patients.
They are groups of individuals that have goals or purposes and use communication to achieve these goals. The literacy inside a discourse community depends on the viable notion of the control of the secondary use of language (Gee 2003). American Linguist John Swales presented six defining characteristics of discourse communities. They are that discourse communities have a broadly agreed set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide feedback and information, utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquires a specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise (Swales 1990). This means that on a very basic level that discourse communities are very specific groups of people who use linguistics and communication with each other to achieve a common goal. Some examples of discourse communities are College major groups, politicians, computer programmers, weightlifters, fraternity and sorority groups, Ebonics groups, video games, vegans, truck drivers, lacrosse players, and French-Canadians. These groups of people all have use different modes of language when communicating with each other to achieve a commonality.
For example, a person who was a vegan would use language differently than truck drivers to achieve their own respective goals. Vegans might use phrases such as gluten, meat, dairy, or phrases like “does this contain any meat or dairy products” whereas a truck driver would over a CB radio communicate with their community using colloquial phrases such as “10-4” and other codes. This type of communication only makes sense to the person if they belong that that ethnography or discourse community. A shining example of this is in the article “Why We Speak” by Ben Yagoda when Antoinette Tuff talks one way to the police dispatcher, and another way to the gunman to calm him down. “Tuff starts by saying, “I’m on Second Avenue in the school and the gentleman said tell them to hold down the police officer coming and he said he going to start shooting so tell them to back off” (Yagoda 2012). In this article she talks very proper to the police dispatcher to get her point across and then when she talks to the gunman she says “He say he don’t care if he die” (Yagoda 2012). She calms him down using the style of communication that his discourse community was a part of which was Ebonics. It is important here to note that she was also a part of the same discourse community. Discourse communities are very important as it is a result of many social and cultural differences between people and being able to communicate between them is a highly sought after skill.
The discourse community that I am a part of and decided to talk about is cancer patients. Cancer patients are very specific discourse group in that our one main goal, above all else, is to get rid of the cancer and stay alive. Sometimes some of us have to go to chemotherapy, and through that chemotherapy we get sick. However an important aspect of this discourse community is that we all understand the sickness that comes with cancer that a person without cancer may not understand. We have group meetings, support groups, and one-on-one therapy sessions to help communicate feelings. This is especially helpful because life looks grim from the outside and the inside and it is important to have people who truly understand you to communicate with you. We do this through certain words and phrases in our meetings and also when we talk with doctors.
Talking about our cancer between other cancer patients can be outwardly scientific in nature because we all want to understand what our bodies are going through. We want to understand on a molecular level what cancer is, what it does, what it takes a hold of and how to fight it. It would be the same way with a person who has other medical conditions such as asthma or celiac disease. A person who is not part of the discourse group may not understand people within the group especially when it comes to the certain language that they use or the way in which they speak about their illness.
I decided to observe cancer patients within a hospital that I used to frequent and describe the language that some of the cancer patients use in their discourse community. Now these were a wide age range of people, some were younger and some were older. What was important here was that everybody was going through this together. One young man was talking to another man and he kept said “Yeah I have epithelial cell carcinoma,” which is a type of cancer that begins in the skin or tissue that line or cover organs. This type of cancer may include skin, lung, pancreatic, or ovarian cancers. They would bounce back and forth, describing in great detail the nature of their own cancers. It was almost like sitting in on a science course. These discourse communities are great researchers and listeners because as the doctors tell them stuff as well, they find their own information so that they can be knowledgeable about their specific ailment.
There are many different types of cancer that people may have such as carcinomas, sarcomas, leukemia, lymphoma, and nervous system cancers (and these are all discourse communities in their own rights) but they can come together as a whole group of people with one common goal, to beat the cancer. They always support each other as much as possible using phrases such as “you can do it”, “kick cancer in the nuts”, and “fuck cancer”. Since they all go through a similar process such as chemotherapy, they can also use language to communicate to each other about how painful the process is, using phrases like “I’m just so tired”, “I’m sick of throwing up”, and other phrases that although on the surface people outside the discourse community may understand on a surface level, they do not fully understand because they have never gone through the same process or feel the same pains that other cancer patients do.
Languages help define this group because they terms that they use are very specific in nature to the modes of cancer and the methods of recovery that they use. For example, someone who is “remission” is a person who has shown sign and symptoms of the cancer returning after treatment options such as chemotherapy have been applied. This group is defined by their ailment and they all share a common underlying ailment. What I learned by observing this group in action is that although cancer may be a sad thing and most people would get upset about it, most of the cancer patients I came across were very hopeful about their outcome. Hope was strong within the cancer patient community and I think their language that they used was very specific to those goals. However the discourse community can get a little messy when they are upset when going through chemotherapy or when they are fed up with their disease, which can happen all too often.
Communication between different discourse communities can be a powerful thing. This is especially apparent in the article by Ben Yagoda and my own discourse community because we communicate certain points to people in different communities using different modes of language. For example, in the article Antoinette Hill talks very proper to the police dispatcher to communicate about the gunman, and then she “switches” her discourse community to talk the gunman down and get him to give up and not commit suicide. Her vernacular changed when she was talking to different people. That is congruent with my discourse community because we might, as cancer patients talk very scientific between each other when talking about our diseases but when we talk to other people such as our friends or colleagues we might use language that would be more basic so that they could understand (on a very surface level) what our cancer is and how it affects us.
Language is one of the most powerful tools that people use in everyday life, and mostly without even knowing it. You may easily switch between discourse communities as many news reporters or politicians have done when going from being in the public light to being amongst their friends. Barack Obama has famous gone from talking very proper to talking more slangy and using Ebonics when going from doing a speech to talking to his friends or other members of the community.
At a very essential level, Language is important to have to be able to communicate between different discourse communities and it means that we are all different. Language matters because we all come from different backgrounds and being able to communicate and seamlessly communicate between these different discourse groups is the only way that we can communicate our goals and thoughts to one another. This is seen in my own discourse community, which is a cancer patient because we use different words and talk about things that other communities wouldn’t understand or relate too. In conclusion, everyone has a specific discourse community that they are a part of, and mine just happens to be cancer patients. I am in this discourse community and use their language and mannerisms.
WORKS CITED
Gee, James Paul. What is Literacy. Negotiating academic literacies: Teaching and learning across languages and cultures 2003.
Yagoda, Ben. Why We Speak. http://www.benyagoda.com. (2012).
