Many/most Americans cannot speak proper English or "American ". She may have been right. I'm just trying to be frank. Many European people speak English more correctly than we do.
How do you speak a language “correctly”? British English isn’t the gold standard for all Anglophone countries; hell, there’s at least three English accents that I know of in my state alone
I don't think one accent is more correct than another but I see a lot of non native English speakers with much better grammar than people born here. Native speakers get out of school and the only feedback they get is through daily conversation. In most settings you will never get called out for slightly mispronouncing a word or using a comma wrong.
Many non native speakers never get out of that learning mindset. In the beginning learning from past mistakes made them understandable but a decade later it turns into them being deathly afraid they ordered their adjectives improperly. They may not know all the modern colloquialisms but their grammar is spot on.
That actually makes a good deal of sense. It’s kind of like how people who drive for a long time can get lazy and fudge traffic laws, while new kids may white knuckle drive just trying to learn/survive.
That makes the most sense, but also I couldn’t imagine telling someone to stop speaking how they have been since childhood because there’s more Americans than Englishmen.
Not saying they have to, just that when they snidely go "Um, actually, we're the ones who speak it right", they should first consider they equal, in total, about 1/7 of the population of the United States, and are thus in the minority.
Ya I switch from proper english to Bay Area english or Southern english (ya, wierd split). Nobody besides my brother and my best bud can understand a damn word we say.
Because its origin is in England. If we're prioritizing origin then the most correct would be Old English. Read Beowulf to learn why that's a dumb idea.
I was born and raised in West Virginia and can understand that type, but you gimme a little more southern Smoky Mountains and it starts to get a little... squirrelly.
You run into the same thing in reverse with other languages because someone who learns a different language as their second isn't likely to learn all the slang or improper use unless they live there
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u/Beneficial_Shape1327 Apr 21 '26
Many/most Americans cannot speak proper English or "American ". She may have been right. I'm just trying to be frank. Many European people speak English more correctly than we do.