Beyond English, the language of the future

Re:Beyond English, the language of the future by wccrawford on Monday November 07, 2011 @10:20AM (#3206557)

I post and correct on a language exchange site. One day, one of my Japanese friends there received a correction from someone with the worst English I have ever seen on that site, including that of people learning English. She immediately stated that she only wanted corrections from people who were fluent in English, and asked that he not correct her entries any more.

He blew up. He claimed he WAS fluent.

After a huge row, it turned out that everyone in his village in China speaks English like that and they are convinced they are fluent. I can only assume that's because they use it with each other, and don't try to communicate with people who are natively fluent.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Beyond English, the language of the future by pugnusferreus on Monday November 07, 2011 @10:39PM (#3209405)

And that's why there's so many variant of English, including the broken ones. Manglish (Malaysian English), Singlish (Singaporean English) and much more.

Though not biology, I think this is how language evolves. For example in China, you have so many dialects (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese etc). And if you drill down to a dialect itself there are slight differences. You can roughly identify which part of province that person is from.

[ Parent | on HN ]