August & Everything After
On "broken" or "insert any adjective" English & how brokenness can be mended
I find myself coming across, insert adjective English often (again?) recently. Have you ever described the way someone speaks English? If you are an English dominant speaker, it’s likely you have at some point in your life or agreed with someone else who has done it. I too have been complicit in situations like these and regret not standing up to others when they have made comments. There is no shame in admitting it, but there is always room for improvement.
My father was an ESL instructor (now predominantly called English as an Additional Language rather than “second” language or “Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada” ) so the way people spoke English, learnt it and used many languages was always part of the conversation in our home when I was a child. But I never heard “broken English” until much later in life. (“Foreign accent” or “thick accent” is closely related as is the flip side": “good accent” or “perfect English” etc.)
I write about this in MTT:
Think of terms like foreign accent or strong or thick accent. And then ask: foreign to whom? Strong or thick for whom? There is no such thing as bad English because good or proper English is indefinable; English cannot be broken because what would it mean to speak whole (unbroken) English? When someone identities a foreign accent, the foreign is contained to the identifier while at the same time, the person with the accented speech, depending on where they are, may also consider themselves, for that instant, unfamiliar. Accents amplify differences and are markers of both belonging and othering. Like mother tongue, accent only exists when there is an other.
Or put another way, we almost never speak in “complete” sentences in English in our day-to-day lives so really, how can anyone measure “good English” or "broken English”?!
I saw “broken English” recently on social media in the context of someone working at a hospital and asking the patient to come with them in their “broken English”. The person posting the comment who was a family member of the patient went on to detail how our healthcare system in the UK is coincidentally also, “broken” - oh the irony, I thought! (If you want more info on this, read about how workers from abroad, who are often not dominant English speakers, keep our health services afloat in the UK and what has happened post-Brexit.)
And then, a writer I admire called someone’s English “precise and hesitant” after identifying the speaker as Chinese. I understood the meaning and the prose but in the context of the sentence, I already knew English was this speaker’s (a tourist) non-dominant language. What did it add to the story to describe the non-dominant English speaker’s use of English this way? When someone is learning a new language or trying to use a language they are not fluent in, would they do it in a way that is not hesitant? And what does “precise English” mean? It is not lost on me I am fixating on two words here that were meant to describe a character in a story. And yet, even then, meditations like these have real-life effects that trickle down to every-day encounters that are often prejudice and discriminatory.
Languages flow, they change, they are learnt and they are lost but they are never broken. Languages are not precise or hesitant, they are not good, bad, ugly or more beautiful than another one, but they are a fundamental part of who we are, how we move in this world and how we interact with others. I love a good adjective but when it comes to languages, let languages be just as they are, allow them to move and change and let people exist in the ways they want to through any form of communication they choose.
And because my mind loves a good poetic hook, I have been thinking of the idea of brokenness in general recently. I noticed a few of my favourite writers are taking August off to spend time with family, go on a holiday, reset, take some time to mend their bodies and minds. I have decided to do the same. I am not big on announcing breaks or returns because those are natural parts of life but in case you don’t receive a newsletter from me for a few weeks, it is only because I need some time to reset and yes, mend. I will celebrate a birthday next week, spend some time away from London with my family and then undergo a final medical treatment that has been a tough go this summer. I am also planning for more book stuff in the fall so I will catch up on that ahead of some other travels finally - stay tuned! I hope you too can take some time away in whatever form that is and works for you. As a friend and colleague wrote me in an email recently:
“Life always starts over in the fall.”
Languages are not broken but sometimes humans are and we all deserve a little mending. It is August and I am looking forward to everything that comes after.
As always, thank you for reading and all your support.
For those of my vintage, the title of this post is of course a reference to the Counting Crows album. Apparently the song of the same name did not make it on the album but was released much later. I had no idea! Adam Duritz turned 60 (!) yesterday and the August reference was about his birthday and how everything came after that. I really wanted to send this out on his birthday yesterday but I also wanted to take my daughter to the splash fountains before it got too hot in London so priorities, Adam and happy belated birthday.
I leave you with my favourite song from that album:
Hope your time away gives you that much needed pause and time to mend and reset❤️ hugs. I liked that paragraph in the book because I had never thought of it that way. The person who identifies the other as foreign is foreign himself/herself to the ‘other’. Thank you for your gentle nudges and bringing awareness xxx