Comment by johnisgood
Comment by johnisgood 3 days ago
Is it reasonable to say that in many (not all) parts of London, English no longer functions reliably as the default public language, even if most individuals technically "speak English"?
Comment by johnisgood 3 days ago
Is it reasonable to say that in many (not all) parts of London, English no longer functions reliably as the default public language, even if most individuals technically "speak English"?
I think the "Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish" comparison is good. Thanks!
Your comment reminded of the youtuber who changed the shop signs in his video into scary non-English script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPZxMVpnCBM
Edit: Changed to link I like a bit more
Yes! This is partly why I brought it up. I remember that video from Kurt Caz.
There are shops elsewhere in Europe with Arabic signs. You can go there and buy things. They're not outside of the ordinary statistical distribution of shops.
Certain people would rather fearmonger though.
No. I think it's easy to underestimate what an incredible superpower native English fluency is, and the lengths that immigrants will go to ensure that their children are fluent in it. That alone stops monolingual enclaves persisting.
The net (and the UK has decades of experience in this, eg with the South Asian immigrants that arrived in the 1950s-1970s) is that while the first generation may only get to decent levels of English, their children are bilingual or monolingual in English, not monolingual in their ancestral tongue.
Occasionally you will get someone with a political axe to grind who visits an area with a lot of immigrants, doesnt hear a lot of English, and posits that there are ethnic monolingual enclaves where they cannot go. I think this is more likely to be a failure of understanding.
I have done a lot of social work with Bangladeshi community. What many people don't know that the Bangladeshi wives who come as dependants speak better English than their husbands and sometimes as good as the natives.
I was surprised the first time I got into volunteer work. Figured that these wives have never spoken English in their home country. So when they moved to London, they learnt English from scratch and picked up the local accent and speaking style. Their grammar may not be perfect sometimes but whose is?
Not sure what point you’re trying to make here in relation to startups.
I am not making any points. I have just heard this take a lot of times and I have not been around London for over 10 years. If there is a point, it is not mine.
As for its relevance: "native speakers on English", etc.
There has been quite a lot of popular YouTubers spreading this.
One of them is Kurt Caz.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46809291)
You should watch the video someone linked that exposes one of his many shady stuff.
Yes, as I have said, over 10 years.
I do not use Twitter nor Facebook. I watch YouTube videos. These YouTubers have >1M subscribers.
I don't know what >1M subscribers have got to do anything. It is the case that many YouTubers pushing a specific propaganda have >1M subscribers. YouTube may be a little better than Twitter or Facebook but if you land upon any propaganda, the algorithm will loop you in and keep supplying more and more propaganda videos. 1M subscribers or 1000 subscribers doesn't matter once you are stuck in the loop.
I see you have not been around in London for over 10 years. How was it back when you were in London? I've been in London for 10 years, so I probably came when you left. Never once I have been in any part of London where English was not the lingua franca. Yes, people speak their native languages too among themselves but I haven't met anyone anywhere in my 10 years who couldn't speak English. I don't think this is any different from any other megacity of the world.
Across most of the world, people who do not share a common native language will speak English to each other. London is no different.
What this is, is a racist meme pretending that the significant fraction of immigrants to London who may occasionally speak their native language to each other in public is somehow a problem. Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish.