I love English. It's a trash fire disguised as a language and I'm here for all of it. However, I really need to be better about people not speaking it "correctly." It's a goddamn trash fire. Of course people don't speak it correctly. I'm pretty sure there's no correct way to speak it. And that's leaving out all the racism and classism which goes into "grammatical perfection."

English isn't Latin. It's a glorious clusterfuck of stolen parts bolted onto a bastard chassis and powered entirely by the burning of dictionaries. There is no way that it should be the lingua franca of international affairs, and yet it is. Speak it any way you want. English doesn't give a fuck. English will take your error and turn it into a part of itself. English drinks prescriptivist tears like fine wine. Contribute to the delinquency of English any way you can.

@intransitivelie
At some point, it occurred to me that if the job of a language is to communicate, then if the person speaking and the person listening both understand, then the language is being used correctly.

@TheGreatLlama
@intransitivelie

The flip side is that if the listener doesn't understand the speaker, it doesn't matter if they claim to be speaking the same language.

I struggle to understand some people in the town where I live, due to accents and dialects, even though we are all native English speakers.

@anthonywilliams @intransitivelie
Sure, but you may as well ask the earth to stop spinning as ask that to stop. Accents, dialects and slang are just part of how we all interact.

@TheGreatLlama
@intransitivelie

I agree. That's not my point.

My point is that "do you speak English?" is a complicated question.

The real question is "do you speak English in a way that this person (or group of people) can understand?" and the answer will vary depending on the listener(s)

@anthonywilliams @TheGreatLlama @intransitivelie this isn’t unique to english, though. try using your canadian french in a cameroonian sometime. cafuckinglice.