You Sure Talk Funny!

I don't know about, but my mom's English is BUSTED! Yeah, I guess you could say she's fluent. She works with the general population and she can go about her daily life in the English language. She watches American programming. She's lived in the United States for 35 years. But there is such a thing in linguistics called fossilization. That's the phenomenon whereby an individual makes a particular language mistake and will always make that mistake because it has become a habit; it's so deeply entrenched in their speech.

My is, for the most part, trilingual. I already mentioned that she speaks English as a foreign language, as she married an American and has resided in the States for the past few decades. Her mother tongue is Vietnamese and, I'm not sure if this is her second language or if she learned it simultaneously with the Vietnamese, but she also speaks Khmer (also known as Cambodian).

Basically, this post is dedicated to my mother's many mispronunciations. Oh, sure - I understand pretty much everything she says, but sometimes other people don't. My mother is quick to get offended when someone doesn't understand her. She claims they are "making fun." But that's not the case. They simply don't always understand what the heck she's talking about! And I guess it doesn't help that she apparently talks so fast. (I say "apparently" because I don't always notice it; I'm used to it.)

But now as an adult, a linguist of sorts, and a parent who wants her child to learn any language as best as she can and the most educated version of the language possible, I have become uber-sensitive to Mom's disjointed speech patterns and they way she says her words. Even when I know precisely what my mother means - or rather, what she means to say, I respond, "What did you say?" or something similar.