Shorter: Woe, the hardships of the native English speakers. The (painfully selective sample of) natives won't share their language with me. Shame on you, non-English speakers.
Ugh. The article made me wrinkle my nose quite a bit. But this quote - prestigious national languages like Berlin German - made me laugh out loud so all is forgiven.
I'll just point out that this article is written based on a sample set of two while ignoring obvious facts like there are several popular entertainers whose entire act is based on being foreign speakers who are fluent in Korean.
I have always been a little uncomfortable when foreigners want to learn singlish - and try to use it and then claim they are so good at it.
Particularly white, anglo foreigners (mainly American, UK, Australian or NZ) - somehow it's okay if non-white ones do? Maybe it's because Singlish sounds fine with their accents, and Singlish is okay with other language grammar idiocracies,but when English speakers try to use it it just feels so wrong.
I can see why Creole speakers would be all NO at others trying to learn it; we already get such shit from everywhere for not speaking Queen's English. The rest of the article just is so... naive and plaintive.
The experiences of Black British people in the Caribbean are, ime and afaik, usually opposite to those in that article. There's an expectation that Black Brits should speak at least one Caribbean language and hostility to Black Brits who don't (for supposedly being snobbish).
...this article makes me want to pat the writer on the head and say 'aww diddums'...also part of me wants to ask how horrendous the American in Berlin's German actually is? In my experience hostility to speaking the local language of this nature is more of the 'oh god please stop mangling my language' kind.
They just don't want to admit that they don't speak the language very well. And ouch, I flinched at the mention of Creole. No, no one wants to listen to you mangle Creole, you insensitive git, not when the people who speak it get so much flak for it.
Geoffrey Pullum is almost certainly over-extrapolating from a couple of anecdotes, as many commenters have pointed out.
On the other hand, I think he's quite right that if English speakers meet a patronizing or uncooperative response when they try to use another language, they're going to give up. That in itself contributes to the global predominance of English.
It's funny, I was reading at a coffee shop this week and the women sitting at my table were talking about the same thing (one of them had recently vacationed in France, and lamented that no one there would speak French with her).
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forkedtongues2013-09-18 08:26 am
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Ugh. The article made me wrinkle my nose quite a bit. But this quote - - made me laugh out loud so all is forgiven.
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Particularly white, anglo foreigners (mainly American, UK, Australian or NZ) - somehow it's okay if non-white ones do? Maybe it's because Singlish sounds fine with their accents, and Singlish is okay with other language grammar idiocracies,but when English speakers try to use it it just feels so wrong.
I can see why Creole speakers would be all NO at others trying to learn it; we already get such shit from everywhere for not speaking Queen's English. The rest of the article just is so... naive and plaintive.
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On the other hand, I think he's quite right that if English speakers meet a patronizing or uncooperative response when they try to use another language, they're going to give up. That in itself contributes to the global predominance of English.
It's everywhere!