It suddenly occurred to me that I have been doing it all wrong all along. For years, I used to catch myself when I spoke English wrong or mispronounced an English word. I even sought to learn the correct American pronunciation lest someone would correct it for me and then I’d feel all embarrassed.
I was very proud of myself when I finally began to speak English confidently. My grammar was decent, my spelling was topnotch and I spoke English the American way(most of the time)-with the right emphasis in the right letter and rolling my t’s as d’s and sharpening up on my the puns and idioms.
One day it occurred to me that my feat in English language is nothing short of an epic achievement-despite its flaws and shortcomings and awful pronunciations. English to me and million of other immigrants is indeed a second language. We speak our mother tongue and we know its alphabet, its grammar and its literature and we speak it so fluently and easily. It was out of our own will, that we chose to start learning to speak English as adults when we moved to a country that required us to speak English. Schools in our country taught us to read and write in English, but we chose to learn to speak it because we needed it as immigrants along with our passports and visas.
When we first started to speak with English speakers, we stumbled and we fell and finally got up just enough to hold a conversation in English. And when we did speak with fear and hesitation, there were times when we heard ourselves search for that english word so desperately in our brains to have that word pop up a day late or never at all. We struggled with past and present tense, the correct gender, using the articles at the right place, prepositions and many a times we just wanted to give up. On top of mustering the courage to learn this new language, we were also expected to be familiar with the American slang and cuss words, the innuendos and racial slurs. Last but not least, we were expected to speak with an American accent! If we didn’t, we were corrected or worse, laughed at.
You see, when a foreign national comes to my country, we do not expect them to speak in our native tongue overnight or ever. We show them grace or at the most, waive off their attempts and move on.
English might be the most spoken language of the world, but when you compete against China and India, the most and 2ndmost populated countries, with their own dialects and innumerable different languages………well, you do the math. I almost want to say our attempts at speaking English is more of doing a favor to make lives easier for those that cannot speak our language.
So, I would like to express, it is OK to speak wrong or broken English, it is OK to make mistakes but it is NOT OK for immigrants to be embarrassed about it and it is NOT OK for English speakers to expect all of us with our own native tongue to speak in impeccable English.
We totally get monolingualism and its limitations and we hope you get bilingualism and its limitations, as well.
