Killing the Speech - "Modern" Kids Losing Language and Confidence? - A Poem by Taylor Mali

Text by Taylor Mali
Animation by Ronnie Bruce


Speech is the vocalized form of human communication. It is based upon the syntactic combination of lexicals and names that are drawn from very large vocabularies. Each spoken word is created out of the phonetic combination of a limited set of vowel and consonant speech sound units. These vocabularies, the syntax which structures them, and their set of speech sound units, differ creating the existence of many thousands of different types of mutually unintelligible human languages. Human speakers (polyglots) are often able to communicate in two or more of them. (Wiki)