Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough, there is a very sudden phase change where people around you go from "you speak pretty good English" to "you speak amazing English" with nothing in between — all of a sudden you're perceived as a peer, and you choice of vocabulary then sets you apart. Ever since I've noticed this I've been trying to make my vocabulary "worse" by incorporating more mundane words into it.
1. https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...
There's the opposite problem, too, where people with poor educations will try to use fancy words to impress people (but often wind up just sounding pretentious).
One of my pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize".
Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing.
I intentionally try to simplify my word choice, even though my vocabulary is much larger than what I use in writing or daily speech, and even when the first word that comes to mind is long/fancy word.
I try to use a five cent word when even a five dollar word would do. It sounds more natural, and you don't come off sounding like you're trying to impress anyone (which is usually counterproductive if you're using vocabulary to do it).
> "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue"
That would be really formal over here too, the kind of wording that I'd expect in a grilling manual explaining how to use it, but not at a barbecue.
I can relate because sometimes I find myself speaking like that when talking to english counterparts, but mostly because when I'm "translating" my thoughts into sentences I have to choose between a group of words of similar meaning, and due to my inexperience, I often choose a less "popular" one.
EDIT:
After reflecting on this a bit more I also believe I often sound formal when speaking english because it's easier to use more/fancier words for the sake of not being misunderstood than it's to come up with a short, direct sentence that transmits my message in a clear way.
It's like adding redundancy to the message for reducing the risk of transmitting unintentional errors ;)
English has its barbarian roots overlaid with French words from the Norman conquest of England. The French aristocracy moved in and took over. The modern result of that is the "English" words of French origin are tells of upper class origins. Americans use that, consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes it's referred to as "coded speech".
For example, someone from upper class America will "purchase" something while a lower class person will "buy" it.
It's not just slight accent changes that distinguish class in America.
Education doesn't affect word choice much. The people who will say things like this were largely already saying them before they received an education.
It's quite an unusual language - a mix of Romance, Arabic, and a hint of English, which sounds like Russian when spoken. There are also plenty of false friends which confuse native speakers of both languages.
That still doesn't explain why someone would say periferia when they meant lado or maybe bordo.
I studied physics so moving the burgers to the periphery of the bbq is great. Precise, unambiguous and what not. Moving them to the side may mean so many things: one side (which one), how bug the side is. Heck, is that side still on the bbq?
As for the example you mentioned, I mainly noticed similar when speaking with my French colleague: when he runs out of words he throws in a French word,which in most cases I can immediately understand because it's either used internationally or at least in my own language,but it's often not the most appropriate word for that sentence,so there's lots of 'periphery of the barbecue' :)
A native english speaker would not have said that, unless they wanted to sound like the instruction manual, or a BBC BBQ Sports commentator. It is overly formal, a common problem that non-native speakers face.
— Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (1982) https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC
There's an old MMORPG that I used to play with friends as a kid. It has an item called copper shield. My friends and I didn't speak english at the time so we'd misspell and mispronounce the item as cooper shield. We had no idea what copper even meant, to us it was just the name of the shield. We all know what copper means now, but that didn't change our understanding of the shield.
A few years ago I decided to create a new account and play again for old time's sake. I joined a party and started talking to people. The second I said "cooper shield" I got a private message in my native language from a guy who learned it by playing the game with us. Because of that highly specific misspelling, he could tell not only that I was a foreigner but also which country I was from.
My Spanish girl friend at the time was among the first batches to take the computer-adaptive version of the GRE (which increases difficulty as you get questions right, and vice versa). While preparing for the verbal part, she noted that the "difficult" words being explained were often words she knew (to lament, intransigent), while the "simple" explanation involved words she had to learn (to mourn, unyielding).
This could then lead to a positive feedback cycle for native Spanish speakers taking the test - get the first few questions right, get "harder" questions with long Latin words (easy!), or get the first few questions wrong, and get "easier" questions with short Germanic words (oh no).
Her test score was indeed many standard deviations away from the paper based practice tests she had taken - but only on the verbal part.
A long time ago I was in the US and I used the word "labyrinth" because I didn't know "maze" and, well, in french for a maze we say "labyrinthe"... I still remember the reaction of my american friend, very surprised by my "advanced" english vocabulary.
We native romance language speakers have it easy ; )
Ironically, though, "maze" may come from the Norwegian word "mas".
But is "labyrinth" from a romance language? It appears in Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon with the remark that it is a foreign word.
Or is "British" still an euphemism for "English"?
Ahh, here's the book: Classical English Style, by Ward Farnsworth [1].
Haven’t had a chance to try it with folk whose first tongue is a Germanic tongue because they all speak really good English, but if I came across someone who didn’t have great English I’d probably use more Germanic words.
I find this subconscious perception of speech with more Latin-origin words interesting though. Something about Germanic words just feels more earthy and real, Latin-origin words feel quite flowery and sort of hard to pin down.
There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to a list of just what you described, synonymous words with Romance vs Germanic origins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_d...
I was taking an Arabic class and the professor was Egyptian. At one point she mentioned 'Pigeons of peace', which sounded ridiculous to my ears since 'doves' are a peace symbol and not pigeons, even though they are the same animal.
I've definitely gone with `consecuentemente` in Spanish because it's an English cognate and I couldn't remember whether I should have used `porque` (=because), or one of the annoyingly similar `por que`(=so that), `por qué` (=why), or `porqué` (=a reason).
E.g. "ameliorate" comes more naturally to the tip of my tongue than "improve", but it's almost never a better word to use.
I got beat up a lot too.
I remember "ameliorate" that an american friend (an adult) didn't even know (but again this guy mixed Portugal and Porto Rico so maybe not the best sample lol), while for me it was clearly an easy cheat because I had more trouble reaching for "enhance".
Ofc since I'm also an ass, I like to claim English "stole" all those French word then proceeded to misspell and massacre them.
Fair enough, but then French is nothing more than horribly misspelled, massacred and ungrammatical Latin.
Of course the same could be said about any other current language, after replacing Latin with whatever our ancestors spoke a couple of thousand years ago.
In regards to "amazing English", how about picking one obscure dialect like Scotish and perfecting that so that the other 95% of English speaker take you as a Scots/Welsh/Californian and don't ask any more questions?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0&list=PLbBvyau8q9... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
And I also didn’t like the quoted person in the article that said they had to (my words) “dumb down” their technical conversation whenever an American entered the conversation or they wouldn’t understand the terms they were using. That is just arrogance and borderline xenophobism in my opinion. Neither the implication that speaking perfect grammar and knowing more words is almost equivalent to moral superiority.
Anyway, that represents the diversity in non-native speakers perceptions somehow I guess. I enjoyed a lot the insights of the professor from New Delhi — I loved the word prepone - and I think the concern about prejudice over not being “native” or “mother tongue” very valid.
I noticed that the usage of slang, correct grammar is an indication of the position on the social ladder and education.
For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries.
And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) but then we add weird things like Americans hearing race in accent and dialect, while the British can hear class but for the most part the opposite is not true.
I think simple English is one of the easiest languages to learn, because of its ubiquity and in most places the material advantage of speaking some; while good English is one of the hardest.
Thanks to the magic of the innernets I have recently discovered a Finnish comedian named Ismo who talks about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
(Arguably NSFW if you work in a kindergarten.)
Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication.
Polish is a goddamn nightmare. I thought English was bad, but hoo-boy, Polish haunts my dreams. To say it is needlessly complex is an understatement. You have to change the endings of adjectives/nouns to match the context, so you end up with a ridiculous number of forms of each word.
"Dog" is pies (pronounced pee-yes, sorta). Unless you use it in the sentence "I have a dog," in which case it is psa (puh-sah, again, sorta... I don't even know how to type out some of the sounds phonetically). If you say "Cooper is my dog" then it's psem.
Depending on who you ask, there's somewhere between twelve and twenty ways to say the word two in Polish (and just to be clear, most of these counts don't include things like both, pair, etc. - just literally the word two).
Then there's the specificity of the verbs of movement. Oh my dear lord - the verbs of movement.
You see, you can never say that you went somewhere or that you're going somewhere. You must specify how. Always. You cannot go to Poland, you must fly to Poland. And every verb of movement has at least two, usually three forms. To fly is latac or leciec or poleciec, depending on whether you flew once, you flew regularly, or you were flying when something happened. The last one is a situation in English that we'd just handle with a form of "to be" and a gerund - "I was flying when..." In Polish, you have to memorize a specific version of each verb for that form.
Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which.
It's like they designed the whole thing just to be a nightmare for any non-native speaker trying to learn it.
Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information:
(I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x ...
"she would have played" -> "zagrałaby"
"would you play?" (fem.) -> "zagrałabyś?"
"he would have played" -> "zagrałby"
"she has been playing" -> "grała"
"she played" -> "zagrała"
Indeed if you come from a simple language like English, it must be a mindfuck.
OTOH, regarding the past and whether something was happening regularly or not, there's some similar concept in Spanish that I never mastered. And all the "subjunctive" in French/Spanish... Languages are hard. Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.
Thai has refreshingly simple grammar but pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension, and the writing system is, um, rich in complexity. Most Western expats simply give up, I hope I will not.
I have heard Polish is pretty difficult. Native Polish speakers, much like Hungarians, take great pride in the difficulty of their language.
AFAICT from spending a lot of time hanging around with natives and learning a few simple sentences, Spanish and Serbian are both pretty "easy" at least up front. I have plans to spend more time in the Canary Islands so I will have to learn some basic Spanish and I do hope it's as easy as it seems.
I can only sympathise with you, but that is the thing. As native speaker you just know when the words sounds good or off.
One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically. The notation to sounds is always the same. So its something :)
You say the spelling is irrational, I challenge you to find reason in the Chinese spelling, and the French one is full of traps due to our insane obsession with keeping our Latin root intact in spelling but not in verbal French.
The genders make little sense in French, serve little purpose but constitute an immense barrier to a new learner. My wife will never, in her entire life, remember a table is a girl but a bridge is a boy. Because of that, she'll always sound like an idiot. My daughter might, but she hates French already and is incredible in English.
Cantonese, or any Chinese variant, has large issues with temporality while English finds the right balance between having several tenses but not the idiotic amount French would have.
I don't know, coming from a romance and an asian experience, English really is a good language you should be proud of. The pronunciation, sure, I'll always sound French, but that's a small problem compared to the vast advantage learning to read it provided me around 16 yo. Learn French at 16 yo and see if you move from the countryside of Normandy to an IB in Hong Kong thanks to it :D
I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible".
I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a degree in English.
Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if you still feel the same way.
(Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a mix at the very least. Great tutorials on TikTok for that as it's apparently endangered.)
If you mean German, haha that's easy, just go to Switzerland with a short stop in Swabia on the way, though in both places you'll have to practically beg people to speak their native tongue in front of a foreigner. The Swiss Germans especially will reflexively speak one of the major foreign tongues, namely Hochdeutsch or English, though in my experience the Swabians will still say stuff like schaffe gell and assume you can grok it since Germans know that much from TV.
Part of the imcomprehensibility stems from their wide use of sayings that aren’t really deductible. “Who knit ya?” is “who are your parents?” It makes sense in retrospect, but I don’t think many people would think that in retrospect.
That's because we use the Latin alphabet for it, but it clearly wasn't mean to encode English. Contrast it with Italian, for which after learning the basic pronunciation of letters you can pretty much read out loud any words and be understood.
My native language is Lithuanian and I always saw English words as sounding weird. However when I learned about the vowel shift and listened to some examples - the words from before sounded exactly like someone would pronounce them while reading in Lithuanian. In fact majority of pupils learning English for the first time would mis-pronounce the written words in exact same manner as they were supposed to sound before the vowel shift. Try listening to some of the soundfiles on that page ("bite", "mate", "boot", etc) and see how much more consistent they were.
I know plenty of people who haven't "lived in English" before they're able to speak it. But I don't think English is much different than other languages in that the most effective way to learn it is to use it.
Compared to the other languages I know, the difference between "school English" and "English on the street" is larger. But of course the other two (German and Hungarian) could be exceptions!
I have heard the same thing said of Spanish, at least as spoken by the working class in Madrid.
In my experience as an EFL teacher living abroad in multiple countries... this is not even remotely accurate.
English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of nonsense grammatical rules that simply don't exist, or that are simplifications which don't always apply.
I remember one interview at a school where the (non-native English speaker) director criticized me for ending a sentence with a preposition -- a classic "fake" rule.
I once reviewed an English test used for Citibank interviews, which I would have failed because a majority of the multiple-choice questions had more than one perfectly valid answer, but I guess not according to the overly simple grammar "rules" that were taught.
It actually can become a serious source of tension between foreign learners who are proud of the 10 years they spent in English classes and insist they therefore speak "correctly", while you the native speaker are making "mistakes".
I remember one memorable conversation where a work colleague tried to insist that something at the store was "costly", and wouldn't accept that the correct term was "expensive" (or just "costs too much"). The dictionary we had wasn't of much help either, since definitions often don't capture the actual subtleties of usage and connotation.
I also can't count the number of times actual (again, non-native) English teachers insisted it was correct to say "I have a doubt" rather than "I have a question" when you don't understand something... and often there's literally no convincing them, because how could their 10 years in the classroom and 20 years of teaching be wrong...?
Regional dialects and quaint idioms are absolutely English though. How else to add tone and shading to our communication? It's the sand the forces the oyster to make pearls.
Everyone was learning American or British English. No one was trying to learn Indian English ;)
"On the contrary, communication ends because [the foreign researchers] cannot explain to the American, in simple language, the advanced topics they were discussing. Yet, the American *takes over the conversation*."
Having been in engineering discussions where the language was not English, it is very noticeable to me that it takes longer for me to formulate a comment or reply. Native speakers are simply far faster to express themselves. When there are multiple native speakers the pace quickens.Speaking simply, to the point and without jargon, is actually an advanced skill. When you don't know the word circle you say square and then hack at the corners with other words until the other person nods. Part of the reason why Zoom classes suck.
I remember getting answers wrong on some tests like:
a) How is 12:45 pm read? I said "twelve forty five pm" but the only valid answer was "a quarter to one"
b) What is the ethnicity of Laos? Which may be Lao or Laotian depending on who you ask. The teacher only accepted Laotian.
c) On one test he also insisted that NK and SK were "one country" and also had that answer marked as wrong. Which may or may not be depending on who you ask.
I tried to appeal some of those answers in the tests but it only annoyed the teacher.
I think it is quite plausible that, for any language, speakers that learned it as a second language will know the grammar and grammatical terms better than most native speakers (particularly monoglot ones).
Since you provided many examples, I will also give a few:
An astounding number of people overcorrect to "It was a present for my wife and I" or so, having trouble with the few remnants of cases (nominative, accusative, genitive) English still has. Similarly, many native speaker seem incapable to identify the much maligned "passive voice". Or, ask a native speaker under what circumstances you'd use the past perfect continuous.
Hard disagree - I don't think your experience as an EFL teacher is relevant to places where english is an official language and is taught from their equivalent of K-12, like India (and many former colonies). EFL courses are far shorter, and not taught to similar depth - some former colonies use the same examination boards as UK students, so it's a far-cry from EFL.
English speakers in those places do not make mistakes that "native" speakers make, like writing "I should of done that" or say "on accident" because it's the opposite of "on purpose" - they simply accept that the rules don't make any sense. I'm not sayin they are better or perfect: they have their own class of mistakes they are prone to.
Like in "homeopathy is backed by science" to what someone would understandably say "I have a doubt" (in a mocking way in that case)
As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that weird that the teacher in the article used it.
If there is one phrase that, to me, defines Indian English, I think it would be "do the needful". For American English speakers, I think the first time you hear/see that, it is totally confusing and jarring in an odd way.
For some reason it means “I also” in Indian English and it sounds weird to non Indian dialect.
Like “Even I don’t understand this” sounds obnoxious to me because in my mind it means “Even I, an almighty being, don’t understand this, who are you to think you can understand it” but it means “I also don’t understand” in Indian English.
According to google “Even” as adverb: used to emphasize something surprising or extreme. So I assume what I think at first is what native English speakers also think.
I hear this daily and I know what it meant to mean now, I had a friend who did not know this and thought her Indian colleague was talking down to her.
It comes from mid-19th century British English, which was used to design templates for formal letter writing in India.
These artifacts have remained as part of Indian English, but died as part of British and American English.
[1] https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/09/doing-needful.h...
The one that sticks in my mind is "club" as a verb meaning "group". "We will club these events together into one message for efficiency".
I hope it goes mainstream some day, at least in tech.
Having said that, one of the things that you have to learn when you start speaking with English speakers from around the world is to recognise which of the words in your vocabulary will be understood vs which are particular to your native country. I'd put words like "prepone" and "needful" into this category: you need to find an alternative when talking to people from places where those words aren't understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
For example: "Good morning, Bob...!!!"
I would really like to know where it comes from. In my experience, they don't realize that "..." comes across as dramatic or passive-aggressive. The "!!!" part I assume is just meant to convey enthusiasm, but it comes across as very aggressive.
For a few years now, I've thought that the ideal work environment for encouraging diversity and inclusion would be an all-remote team that used only written communication, preferring asynchronous communication as much as possible. One advantage of such an environment would be that people like me couldn't judge others based on their accents. But then, I'm not ready to actually go to this extreme in my own work. I'm the cofounder of a tiny company, and my cofounder and I have several spoken conversations per day. I don't think either of us want to change that. Perhaps I could limit myself to written communication with any employees that we hire, but that feels like a double standard.
That, and people will start judging on grammar, ability to spell, word choice, etc, etc. I think you'd just be trading one set of prejudices for another.
As an Brit, at least we live in a country where insulin is covered.
I used to think I spoke perfect American English until someone pointed out that I say the th sound weirdly (I think it's called dental th-stopping [0]). I also spent some time in England as a child and now say some words like "rather" with the English pronunciation. I'm living in England again now as an adult and am picking up some English colloquialisms, though usually pronounced in an American accent.
I also unintentionally end up speaking in an Indian accent when I talk to speakers of Indian English, but can't put on (even intentionally) an English accent to save my life even though I had one when I lived in England as a child.
The article raised my awareness of that. That's why I put the one usage of "native" in the GP comment in quotes, and mostly avoided the word.
Maybe part of the problem is AV equipment? Once place I worked we had MAJOR communication difficulties with understanding Indian and SE Asian folks over the speakerphone. It was a perfect storm of unfamiliar inflections, vowels not being differentiated from each other strongly enough, consonants getting screwed up and rapid speech.
Really good headsets on both ears and repeated exposure seemed to resolve the discomfort and dread for many folks. I always wondered if there were similar complaints on the Asian side, I never heard anything about it. Do they find British/American accents hard to understand? I don't know.
With Deepl (and even Google Translate) I can communicate very well with anyone in German, Polish or any of the supported languages, while in person it would be impossible, as I don't know the language at all.
Google Assistant works, but it gets annoying real fast as it's slow and pretty cumbersome to use.
A more algorithmic rule is found in APA style: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2016/10/hyphenation-stati...
Edit: NPR also uses the Associated Press Stylebook and related resources.
Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.
You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it!
If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely opaque to a non-native speaker.
Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little whittling lovely knife"?
However, I don't believe it is opague to a non-native speaker who has sufficient experience with the language.
Ugh. When will this victim mentality end? I'm a naturalised citizen in a foreign country and get asked this all the time because of my accent. It has never come across as anything less than interest.
If they're cutting them off in order to change topic & bring it up, not so much!
Language is a crazy thing.
When I taught English abroad, I would get asked questions all the time on things I hadn't researched yet so often the answer was "just because".
The more someone's accent differs from what I'm used to, the more difficult it is for me to understand. I notice that on the phone, I can understand an accent like mine over a bad connection. The further one's accent is from mine, the better quality connection I need.
It's also significantly more work to understand a presentation the more distant the speaker's accent is. That means the less interesting the presentation is, the more likely I am to not make the effort.
It's not fair, but it's a fact of life.
Language is a living protocol that you can only learn by listening people use it and using it yourself constantly. Whether a made up word makes sense syntactically and grammatically doesn't matter. In fact whether it's in a dictionary also doesn't matter. What matters is being understood. So you need to use words people know. Sometimes you're in a position to make up a new word, when you need to. Talking to students about when their exam is... is not one of those situations.
And a heavy accent literally corrupts your communication. On top of making it hard to understand what words you say, your intonation becomes completely unintelligible, because you're speaking English, but intonating in another language. You're literally not speaking entirely in English. Strong Indian accent is especially infuriating for this, I find it very hard to listen to and understand.
And by the way, made-up words and strong accents are ESPECIALLY annoying to OTHER non-native English speakers, because we have an extra hard time parsing this on top of understanding a non-native language already.
I should know, I'm a Bulgarian, so... (I have slight accent).
This applies to any accent you were not exposed previously. I noticed that after some time you get used and understand it perfectly fine.
I disagree. In this case, it was based on the fact that no one you were talking to knew the meaning of the word you'd made up. This is descriptivism at work.
If something is to become a word, people need to actually use it in the first place. Indian English is different than American English is different than Black American English is different than UK English.
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles...
If you're ever worried about how you'll be perceived in these kinds of scenarios, just make sure you're speaking with enough of an accent to communicates English is not your first language. The people who would otherwise be offended will not recognize you a target of the current cultural tensions that pronouns represent.
Translating from English to Persian must be tough, no? For example I did this test in Google Translate and it appeared to strip the second sentence of it's meaning, making the person that put the chicken in the oven ambiguous:
> Sam and Sally went home. Once there, she put the chicken in the oven.
> سام و سالی به خانه خود رفتند. پس از آنجا ، او مرغ را در اجاق قرار داد.
However, a native speaker won't struggle in speech, and they'll know the various idioms used all the time in colloquial speech. Of course native speakers don't have to take the TEFL/TOEFL! They don't consciously think about grammar rules, they just employ them nearly always perfectly in speech. Of course not every native speaker is good at writing at an academic level and we should be aware of that.
This phenomenon is also not unique to English! This article and the one linked are basically following the trend of bashing one's own English; how dare native speakers speak their language like they have been their entire life? Part of learning any language is learning the cultural idiosyncrasies and idioms. Of course, native speakers should strive to make sure they're not overusing idioms with a EFL/ESL audience, but knowing "grammar" and "complex technical terms" doesn't actually mean you can speak [American/UK/Indian/Black American/etc] English.
Humans are just curious when someone has a different accent than the local area. There are various American accents. I've had that question asked a lot when I was living in Korea. Getting upset about it is entirely a personal choice.
I'm not American but I don't like this. If an American author had written that everything is fine until "a foreigner joins the group" there would be a twitterstorm.
What's more, this is not about Americans, or even native English speakers. I'll give you a completely different example of how a group with a common language can exclude someone who doesn't quite share it.
I knew a couple were the woman was Greek and the man was from Chile. They lived in Greece and hung out with Greeks. I witnessed first hand, dozens of times, how the Chilean guy was left out of conversations. It happened in three phases. In the first phase, everyone would speak to him in English. This lasted for a few minutes, time enough to exchange greetings and pleasantries and so on. In the second phase, the Greeks would revert to speaking to each other in Greek. In the third stage, the Chilean man would try to join the conversation in Greek. At that point, the Greeks would reply in English. Then the process looped back to the second phase.
The Chilean guy was trying to learn Greek, but he never could - because nobody spoke to him in Greek long enough for him to learn it. He also failed to make any friends, because everyone spoke to him only for a short time, as long as they felt comfortable speaking in English.
Obviously I noticed this so I tried to rectify it by speaking to him only in Greek. We ended up code-switching a lot but at least we could keep going for a longer time than he did with others. I realised his frustration when we explicitly discussed how I spoke to him in Greek and he said, exasperated "you're the only one!".
Language can be a huge barrier that we raise subconsiously around us- but it doesn't help to single out one nationality for it. Everyone does it.
I love language-learning, and I can usually bootstrap myself to a level where the locals don’t reply in English when I want to practice. However, with Dutch I found it difficult to bootstrap and I experienced what your Chilean did. When I complained about how locals weren’t letting me practice, I was told (the famous Dutch directness!) that I needed to simply hire a teacher to get to a higher level, instead of being annoying to local people. People’s time is precious, and a foreigner speaking the local language haltingly is arguably disrespectful of their time.
My experience mirrors what is described in the article, but only with people from Europe. Non-native English speakers from Europe look down on Americans, in a sort of "gate-keeping" manner where Europeans "own" the language. They have a better grasp of the "precise and elaborate formal English" and do not hesitate to correct Americans and tell them they don't understand grammar and are uneducated. (I'm inclined to agree with them.)
My experience speaking with non-native speakers from Asia, India, and Central & South America has been different. Maybe we are more willing to accept that there is a language barrier, but no one "owns" it.
And, like the article says, trying to use a culturally relevant idiom is a futile task.
This is a common pattern of false equivalency, like "reverse racism" and the likes.
The analogy is invalid because the harms of discrimination come from the power imbalance.
In this case, immigrants in the US are in a position of disadvantage, due to linguistic/cultural struggles and the perception issues they cause. Perpetuating stereotypes that reinforce that perception causes harm.
Usually this difference is small enough that it doesn’t matter but there are cases like an Indian saying, “there are too many Mexicans in this neighborhood” and meaning “This neighborhood has a lot of Mexicans” in a neutral sense, but an American hearing that might interpret it as “The number of Mexicans in this neighborhood is a bad thing”
I think most Americans would interpret it this way given it plays directly into the stereotype of "All Indians/Asians Are Incredibly Racist/Sexist."
Now, we Indians find it hard to understand when others non-native speakers speak English just as others for Indians.
I had had my experiences being the "English Translator" for Indians and Japanese speaking, well, English. I enunciate, use simpler words, and shorter sentences.
I happen to grow up in a corner of India where languages and dialects differ every quarter-mile. So, English happened to be the common thread. Our schools fined us ₹0.50 in my times if we do not speak in English since very early grade.
During early 2000s I started visiting countries outside India, such as US, and UK. Then I realized, that my English sucks. I have been learning a lot more since. Working mostly with Native English Speaking clients did do a whole lot of fast-forward into "speaking English" the proper way.
Unfortunately, I feel my own language is limited and very complex. My family switch to English if we need to understand things faster and better. My daughters are learning our original language but they sounded very funny and kinda "language-retarted" to their counterparts (cousins, relative back home).
The interesting thing is I can speak and understand a minimum of three languages (English, Hindi, and our Language) like most Indians. I can also get away with exchanging info with people speaking in Marathi, Gujarathi, and a bit of Bengali, Punjabi, Haryanbi, etc.
Attempting and preparing to learn Japanese soon.
I guess it bothers me even more as someone who wasn't born in an English speaking country but spoke it nearly exclusively after childhood. It's a common sentiment - one of my old history teachers lived in England for 20 or so years, and was asked if he can provide some proof he can speak English for his citizenship. How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a teacher and not be able to speak the language?
I moved to Switzerland to do a master's degree in Germany which was still, essentially, in German. Didn't matter that I'd already read research literature and written term papers in English, I still had to do a TOEFL for no discernible reason. But even worse, should I end up deciding to do another degree somewhere else, I'd just have to do it all over, even though I use English everyday at work.
I understand making sure that people speak and understand English properly in an academic setting, but TOEFL etc. are just money machines.
By lying on their resume. That's why people ask questions like that, to uncover frauds.
I've noticed that it's quite common for monolinguals to be judgemental about people's English if it doesn't sound exactly like their own dialect of English. But the lack of linguistic ability often lies with the monolingual listener in these cases. I grew up monolingual, so I understand how easy it is to judge someone who speaks in a way that is less comfortably understood. But communication is a two way process, both the speaker and the listener have to develop the skill and put in the effort for successful communication to take place. There are countless dialects of English, and a lot of variety even among people who speak English as their first language. It seems that many people are unaware of this.
The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of those three languages leads me to believe it was not. The manager knew he didn't speak it from infancy because Madani spoke it fluently but without the style of a native speaker. Perhaps the difference in that position would be irrelevant, such as a STEM job. There are positions, however, it would matter, such as sales or public relations where that last one percent can mean everything.
Non-native here, but I have an opinion on your choice of examples. They aren't posh or counter-productive, on the contrary, they are just specific to fields under-represented in popular culture (political history, fantasy/longevity research, music/acoustics). I don't see any obvious ways to convey the same meaning using more common words.
Pre production post production. Pre release post release. Prepone, postpone.
> " 'Why not?,' I asked."
> " 'Because 'native' refers to the language you spoke as a child,' she answered with a tender, patient look."
Most people think of it like that because it's accurate in like 99.999% of cases, but that's not what "native speaker" means. It's more like, "is fluent and only learned through immersion, not from a class or relating words to another language" - which is how all children learn their first language, but is far less common as adults.
So native speakers mostly learn through memorization and internalizing grammar over a long period, instead of explicitly learning the rules of a language. That's why "prepone" is confusing - native speakers don't learn "postpone" as "post + pone", but as a single unit, so in an area where it's not a normal word, "prepone" is far less likely to be interpreted as "pre + pone", and more likely to be a new word entirely.
(Aside, reading the comic before the article, I paused on it and tried to figure out what it meant. I was thinking some odd local version of "prepare")
“a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood”
And this makes sense, because “native” as an adjective means:
“associated with the place or circumstances of a person's birth”
So native speaker literally means a speaker by birth. Where are you getting the “fluent only by immersion” definition?
Are you instead talking about “native fluency,” which is typically used to mean fluency at the level of a native speaker, which is technically achievable by anyone (though realistically impossible after a certain age)?
Based on this, I could be considered native English speaker even though I've been speaking English only for the past 1/3 of my life. But that's exactly what I did. There were times when I sat down and read about the grammar in books, but to this day, I have no idea what a second or third conditional is, I just use them "naturally". It was two years ago that I realized what the difference was between an adjective and an adverb.
So, I don't really think this is a good explanation of what a native speaker is.
To me, your "mother language" is simply the language that your mother, or other primary caregiver, spoke to you as a child. It is certainly plausible to have more than one in multilingual households.
A native speaker may not have spoken that to language with their parents, but they learned it natively from other speakers at a young enough age that their phonemes adjust.
In my opinion, native speakers tend to have a much deeper understanding of the meanings and connotations of the words/phrases they use but may indeed have smaller volcabularies than fluent, but non-native, speakers. The difference between "costly" and "expensive" is obvious to a native english speaker, but might not have been learned by a fluent speaker with a larger volcabulary.
If you listen to linguists, grammar is descriptive not prescriptive. Grammar is not a fundemental trait of language, but a model of language use that helps us think about how language is used.
I do think it is important to be aware of how we use language to enforce economic and cultural segregation. Language use is often used as a proxy for class and education and those who don't fit the "standard" are faced with discrimination.
Something so subtle that a "native" - or maybe it would just be American? - speaker would never say.
Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.
To a EU French ear, Canadian French is a horrible butchery of the beautiful language that is French. The Canadians don't roll their R's properly and all sorts of other unspeakable things. ;-)
Meanwhile, an EU French person visiting the French speaking parts of Canada will often have a significant amount of difficulty being understood. This is not because of their lack of mastery of the French language, but because their true pronunciation of French is not what the Canadian ear expects.
(Shout out to anyone who learned a lot of vocabulary from Calvin and Hobbes.)
2. "Language changes" pretty much equates to people making mistakes, and those mistakes becoming part of the language. Since English has spread over so much of the world, in addition to it not having a central authority that is looked to for its structure (as does French), many mistakes have come in, and made the language weird. This overlaps a bit with (1).
I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my teachers kept correcting it.
At work a few years back, a Chinese colleague was speaking with an Indian colleague. I had some trouble understanding them with their heavy accents, but they were apparently having no trouble understanding each other.
At the same workplace, my Italian boss would sometimes converse with a Canadian colleague in French.
My dad is one of those people who when speaking to non-native English speakers, he speaks (a lot) louder, as if that helps them to understand (I don’t think it does).
In Italy one time, my daughter was trying to order espresso with hot milk but got served a glass of cold milk because she asked for a latte. She's currently studying German and is amused by the German for "birth control pills": "Anti-Baby-Pillen".
I am reminded of a habit from seven habits of highly effective people: seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Shrug.
I asked my high school English teacher the proper way to contract "should not have" in writing; I was trying my hand at short stories, and I wanted it in the dialogue. She said it wasn't a thing. Not that there's no standard convention, but that it's not a thing.
Despite me saying and hearing "shouldn't've" all the time.
Of course these are a social construct, but it’s not unfair to characterize that:
“General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans and widely perceived, among Americans, as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
Use of words/phrases such as "thought process" (mostly incorrectly), "sync up", "paradigm shift", "disrupt", "blue/green ocean", "ballpark" and so on and on...
'blighty' is a misheard vilaiti(foreigner). It's a tango, that's how the sausage is made and there are no wrong answers.
You make a mess of yoga and Indian cuisine. We add liberal modifications to english. It's all good.
Interesting thing is, if there is a time when are a lot more Indians speaking English and all making the same 'mistakes' than other people, how long till the mistakes are part of the language.
I'm starting to be very tired of reading this kind of statement everywhere. No, not every existing concept is a conspiracy to discriminate against some people. Not everything is a social construct (few things are). You [article author] are not a victim of a grand linguistic scheme established by men/White/English speakers/whatever to make you feel bad about your English level. The concept is valid and useful in language education.
In (modern) linguistics, you try to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, watching language artifacts through the looking glass. English exists in many so-called varieties, geographical varieties, different varieties used in different social strata of one and the same society.
As it happens, though, Arabic is also a notably polycentric language, although it has a single prestige dialect too (MSA). And English is the closest thing India has to a prestige dialect, since all other languages are regional.
There is a trend by native English speakers to bash english, and treat it like no other language can have any of these issues.
The only major difference is noted in the other response; English has a lot of different dialects. Korean has Standard Korean that everyone learns now, and unofficial regional dialects. With English you have people randomly learning American English, UK English, Indian English, etc, which all have various differences in vocabulary, idioms, grammar, etc.
Imagine a world where India is the center of the English speaking world (not too far fetched considering the population of English speakers), we would all start using prepone because that's just the cultural norm of the most common branch of English.
— James Nicoll
I think this aspect of English is what makes it so complicated. For instance, words are spelt with an "f" or a "ph" depending on what language we originally stole it from.
I use it all the time.
And why do we computer people have prefixes and postfixes, when the world was just getting by fine with prefixes and and suffixes. (I realize we did have to invent 'infix'.)
And why is it antebellum and pre-war, but postbellum and post post-war. Why does no one ever use postdeluvian and only antediluvian?
sigh
I am constantly amazed by my co-workers abilities to think quickly over highly technical topics and make passionate arguments over complex topics-- in a second or third language!
Human beings are fantastic.
Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
"We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common.
The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not used as a standalone.
(From "intro" in case it's not obvious.)
(Sorry. Seriously though, I'm surprised "prepone" never caught on before, it makes intuitive sense!)
Sounds fine to me. I think I'm going to use prepone from now on.
And I still construct sentences oddly, even though I've been speaking some English every day for 50+ years.
Hindi should be that common thread instead.
* Listening to market business analysis one will often hear "And this way the customer tries to gauge the value of THAT bag/watch/car..." where the word 'that' is emphasized with an almost implicit nod in the direction of the object. It's not so much grammar usage (which v. that). Rather it's a cloyingly emotional hustle (as I see) it to both magnify, mystify, and focus on the object in question.
* "... That said ... " / "...that being said..." appears often in writing, and even HN.
* Listen to any pitch in the software world. See if you can get through one without hearing any of these words or phrases: "... experience ...", 'actually' as in " ... Now press OK and it actually [does XYZ which was the whole point anyway]"; or "All we wanted to do was simply [some in, in fact, quite complex task] ... so we set out to [save the world]". More abstractly modern marketing emotionally plays on the feelings of connectedness or family in an insincere way. If you know Absolutely Fabulous you might know the Patsy line: "Get your dry cleaning back and it's a revolution" ... you know because the dry cleaners are practically your close loving family looking out for your chores so you have time to save the world / be a teacher ... so now everything is practically either an act of magic or Old Testament level miracles.
* In verbal conversation the word "like" is used far too much
* Finally, I have a number of friends for whom Portuguese is their native language. I don't understand it. Still I have tried to listen carefully for the parallel in English when we say "ummm" or "ahhh" to buy time while we think of the next line or the "like" example to start a sentence ... or the rising intonation to make a statement, and not asking a question. For a great example of rising intonation: look for the Noon dieting TV commercial and listen for the African American Lady who's got a line: "It's amazing how the little things ...". By the time she's done she's talking quickly at high pitch. I don't hear this in Portuguese.
In the first registration part, I discovered I didn't have an NHI number because I haven't been to a doctor. Therefore I was given a Post-It note on my consent form saying "Manual Entry".
After the jab, the observation nurses would call out names every few minutes: David, Priscilla, Marion, Yi Xin, Manuel, Daniel, Kyungbook, Richard... no surnames.
I didn't really think much of it. Besides, it was raining outside, I had my laptop, and I wasn't in a hurry to leave. When it was almost closing, there were only two of us left.
"Are you Manuel?" they asked. I said my name is Peter, not Manuel! But apparently they were calling "Manual". The Kiwi accent is hard to understand, even for a native speaker!
However, the dark underbelly of this phenomenon is that there are some serious racist undertones that come with this. Some words are "proper English" because it came from specific parts of the world, meanwhile similar words from other places are "Wrong English".
Certain speakers have accents that are "beautiful" and rewarded even if they completely butcher the language, it is completely understandable and held in high regard. Meanwhile others are considered "funny" or "stupid" and the speaker's intelligence gets questioned because of the accent.
As a non native speaker, I've had so many experiences where my intelligence is insulted and get shut down, because of my accent. Meanwhile the French guy next door gets applauded for saying the same thing again and gets a promotion. Language politics is real and it has severe consequences.
So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual English? But that would see a small minority of the number of English-language speakers setting the rules for the huge majority.
So maybe (as others have suggested) we follow the majority of native English speakers and use the Indian version?
Languages keep on evolving, you just have to deal with it.
Or the hilarious situation I had at a legal conference. I thought one of my right-wing US friends had gone totally racist. He was complaining about all the new "turbins" he was seeing while driving to the conference. I thought he meant turban, but that's just how Americans pronounce "turbine", as in the wind turbines he could see from the highway.