Different tongues of English
Recently, I’ve watched a funny YouTube video, which is a comedy made my Malaysian in English. But for me, the funniest part was not the video, but the “English” they spoke. When the first time I was watching this video, I didn’t even understand his very first sentence, I asked myself a few seconds afterwards : “ Did he just spoke English?” Clearly, he did, but it takes time for me to understand his Malaysian style English.
We’ve already talked about the language localizations and varies tongues of English speakers all over the world in class, but the unique fluent, pronunciation and combination still amazed me anyway. I didn’t except English can be this varies in such a small pice of the world—Asia. I’ve been to Japan when I was still in elementary school, but my English skill was just as suck as you can imagine, so I didn’t have any useful practical experiences there.
When a language, especially the world lingua franca—English, comes to this varies around the world, the biggest problem is: can we really understand each other through the “English” we spoke?
One of my most memorable moment related to this issue was probably in 2017, when I was in Berkeley, CA for summer school. I had a classmate who’s name is Abruzzi if I remember it correctly, and he comes from India. One afternoon, we decided to have some Chinese food near our campus for dinner, after checked out, he asked me: “What’s the dime?” Until now when I recalled his pronunciation, I still strong believe what I heard was not the word “Time” but “Dime”. So I was confused, I said: “Pardon?” and then try to listen as carefully as I can. Then he repeated his question: “What’s the dime?”, he looks confused too, so we looked at each other’s confused face for a few seconds until he pointed his empty wrist to me and repeated again: “What’s the dime, my friend.” The finally I understood him and told him the time. Later that day, I soon fond out not only me, but almost all Asian students can’t understand Abruzzi’s unique Inglish while western students like Americans and Europeans have no problem to understand his tongue, interesting.
So this was my little funny experience about different tongues of English, I do think I can’t understand English spoke by native Indian people until now. Today, I can still hear some complaints about the tongue of American-Indian teacher among middle and eastern Asian students. Still remember the Youtube video I mentioned in the beginning of my blog? I’ve attached a link below so if you want to experience Malaysian English, click it. If you had some similar confusion about different tongues of language with me, let me know them!
In the video, I recognized the tag "lah" from what I have read about Singaporean English. I don't have a new video to share with you with another variety, but here's a fun explanation of "lah" and other characteristics of Malaysian English - https://www.travelfish.org/beginners_detail/malaysia/59
ReplyDelete(and now that I have read that page, I am going to look for opportunities to say "as useful as a chocolate teapot" because that expression is so lovely!)