An underrated problem of learning to speak a language as a native English speaker is when you’re trying to practice but you’re in a place where most people speak English better than you speak their language and they give up on you and switch to English
i’m gonna get so bullied for this but after doing my english language A level, i’m critical of how much the british accent is mocked—specifically the variant of the accent that’s mocked. this variation (with t-glottalisation, so like wa’er instead of water) is also treated badly within the uk for being predominantly associated with the working class.
accent discrimination is a huge, un-talked about issue here, given that there’s a vast variation of accents and dialects in the uk. i wouldnt expect overseas people to know this, but people really do lose out on jobs etc because of this discrimination, or are judged because they don’t sound “upper-class” and “respectable” enough. there have been instances of schools forcing children with “undesirable” accents to speak “properly” (historically this is very pervasive—the standardisation of english in schools sought to eradicate regional dialects. the linguist john honey believes standard english should be mandatory so that working class people could sound smarter and get better jobs).
and you can see it in pop culture: in movies with british bad guy goons, the baddies usually have a working class or cockney accent (the one people find so funny) as a direct reflection of the notion that working class = bad (101 dalmations is a prime example). on the flip side, suave, smart british villains speak in standard english, reflecting the classist notion that upper class accent = smarter (howard giles’ accentism study showed that “upper class” accents are considered intelligent).
colloquialisms like “innit” are features of working class accents (see cockney english, estuary english, multicultural london english) and yes, these are practically demonised in the uk too, bythe upper class and mainstream media to maintain the age old presentation of the working class as rough, uncultured and unintelligent.
what i’m saying is if you’re gonna make fun of the accent, maybe go for the snobby ones like received pronunciation because these don’t have a history of being used to demonise the working class. boris johnson is literally right there and ready to be bullied
On the topic of English people being shitheads towards Welsh people – This fucking dude today on AITA
Yeah pretty sure we’re all hoping for a divorce on this one lol
how did this fucker say it’s “not as bad as it sounds” and then somehow end up being even worse than it sounds by the fourth sentence
Further updates, I couldn’t resist looking this one up.
Character development.
It is part of English propaganda that native languages are “useless” and “dead” and there is a history of laws that make speaking and using these languages illegal. Scot, Irish, and Welsh people have all been forced learn and speak English.
These languages aren’t “dead” they are actively being murdered.
I’m going to cry, this is actually beautiful. CHARACTER GROWTH, Y’ALL!
people understand that Spanish speakers speak different dialects of the Spanish language but don’t understand that black people speak a dialect of the English language
saw a variation of this conversation on twitter earlier
I just want to state for the record that this is completely uncontroversial among linguists. It’s the first day of sociolinguistics class.
And also if you accept that AAVE is its own dialect, instead of screaming about how it’s “bad English,” ITS RULES ARE ACTUALLY RELATIVELY SIMPLE. I can’t speak it, but I have coworkers who are Black and I have no trouble understanding the nuances when they speak it.
Like, take the habitual be. It’s a great structure we don’t have in standard American or British English. The example I’ve seen used, because it’s readily recognizable to most people, is “Cookie Monster be eating cookies.” Is Cookie Monster eating cookies at this precise point in his sketch? Maybe not, but we know with certainty that he eats them with quite a lot of regularity. It’s very likely that we will see him eating them in the near future, because he be eating cookies. You understand this perfectly, yes? Cookie Monster be eating cookies, teachers be giving homework, I be writing essays on Tumblr. As soon as you know it’s not a misconjugation of “to be,” it makes perfect sense.
There are rules and they are—you could even say “they be”—consistent. Even more consistent than standard English, actually. “Give me these wrenches,” “give me those wrenches,” or you could just simplify it to “give me them wrenches” and stop worrying about the conjugation because who fucking CARES, we have some wrenches to get. People throw a fit about the use of “them” this way, but if you take the very very long view of English—by which I mean all 1300-or-so years of just its written record—we’ve done this for CENTURIES. Look up something called “Latin cases and declensions” and prepare to cry. English used to look like that too. We’ve simplified it for convenience’s sake. The AAVE “them” is just another example to throw on the pile of a long, long tradition of simplifying our plurals. (Which, by the way, we’ve also done with our pronouns, before anyone starts screeching about how you can’t DO that. “You” is plural. It’s only been a singular form since the 1600s. Prior to that, thee/thou/thine was singular and informal and you/you/yours was plural and formal. And as late as the mid-1600s we had no neuter possessive pronoun. We see this in Shakespeare: “see how far that little candle throws his light,” instead of “its light.”)
Listen I have learned English as a second language for 20+ years and my brain still aborts when I see that word
That word’s at least partly French, right?
French is my second language and english is my third. I can assure you that word can only fucking come from like the Necronomicon or something like that bc you won’t find anything so cursed even in french
English is my first language and I still hate that goddamn word.
Yacht is a mangled version of Jaghte, from Dutch, where it indicated a fast ship for hunting pirates. In English, it turned into a fast pleasure ship.
I guess the lesson here is, ‘if something’s too cursed to be French, then it’s probably Dutch’ and I fully support that.
One time I was cooking with a girl and we were both bilingual but we didn’t have a language in common so we were just sitting by the fire doing prep work quietly and I was peeling little garlic cloves to mince and she put her hand on my arm to stop me and demonstrated how you’re supposed to press on the clove with the flat side of your knife to break the shell off all at once to peel it and I was like oh! And I imitated her and she nodded in approval and we went back to quietly peeling and mincing the garlic and I don’t want to be hyperbolic but in that moment I was like wow I truly understand the universal thread of human love and connection inherent in our souls or whatever
ifesbob 