Open Thread for February 11 - 17

Scott Garrabrant

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

The proper way to say this is: she speaks higher-status English than most native speakers.

I wonder if there's an implication that colloquial language is more complex than high status language.

The things being measured are different. To a first approximation, all native speakers do maximally well at sounding like a native speaker.

Lumifer's friend may indeed speak like a native speaker (though it's rare for people who learned as adults to do so), but she cannot be better at it than "most 'natives'".

What she can be better at than most natives is:

Vocabulary.
Speaking a high-status dialect (e.g., avoiding third person singular "don't", double negatives, and "there's" + plural).
Using complex sentence structures.
Avoid

... (read more)

2tut12y

Or maybe it means that high status and low status English have different difficulties, and native speakers tend to learn the one that their parents use (finding others harder) while L2 speakers learn to speak from a description of English which is actually a description of a particular high status accent (usually either Oxford or New England I think)

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Open Thread for February 11 - 17

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

5

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Open Thread for February 11 - 17

5

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

5