Habitual English use

[Jamie (K)]

I've noticed something here in my US city about who uses English most of the time and who doesn't.

I was in a coffee shop yesterday that was run by Chaldeans. They spoke English all the time to each other, and I never heard them speak Arabic or Chaldean. One clerk was confused by the cash register, and her manager explained it to her completely in English. He could have done it in Arabic, but he didn't. A Chaldean friend of mine bought some coffee and some food. The transaction could easily have been completed in Chaldean, but she and the clerks spoke English without even thinking about it, even though they all knew that they were all Chaldean.

Similarly, there are a lot of Albanians working at a supermarket near my house, and in some restaurants. They could easily speak Albanian to each other, but they don't. Everything is in English. If you greet them in Albanian, they answer in English.

Compare this to the supermarket I mentioned in another post. Everyone there speaks Polish all the time, unless they can clearly see that a customer is not Polish. Some of the employees might be in the US for several years and still never learn English well. Similarly, there is a Mexican restaurant I go to where I have to speak Spanish, because some of the employees can't speak more than a few words of English after three years in the US. Last semester I had an African student in my class who actually knew English pretty well, but she insisted on speaking French to me all the time. I once had an Uzbek engineer in my classes who also knew a lot of English, but she spoke only Russian to me, even if I insisted she switch to English. It's common in my area for native-born Americans from Hmong-speaking families to need ESL even after they finish high school, because so many of them speak so little English.

This is a big puzzle to me, because I see in my classes and in daily life that immigrants from some groups seem to start speaking and thinking in English sooner than people from others. I look for a difference in the way they live, and I can't find it. In my area, Chaldeans, Albanians, Poles and Mexicans all have large, strongly unified ethnic communities and maintain many aspects of their way of life. They can watch TV in their languages, they have their own churches, they have grocery stores that cater to them.

However, Chaldeans and Albanians seem to switch to English very fast, and a 20-year-old Chaldean or Albanian who has been here for two years usually speaks very fluent English with barely any foreign accent. Meanwhile, I commonly get Poles and Hmong people in my classes who speak almost no English after two or three years. Last semester I had a Polish woman who couldn't speak English after 17 years. I can't tell what it is about the different groups that causes this difference.

By the way, in one Chaldean family I know, the father began learning English at the age of 77. He is now almost 81, and he still spends most of his day learning English. This is a great hardship for him, because his eyesight isn't good and he has to wear thick glasses and use a giant magnifying glass to see the page, but he laboriously spends a large part of his day practicing English. His wife couldn't read in any language before she came to the US, and even she is learning English well.

[Lost_Soul]

I think I would not start learning any foreign language if I were 77. That man is a very brave fellow to take up this uneasy task.

[Jamie (K)]

[NinaZara]

Some people are proud using English than their own mother tongue. Malaysians, usually people my father's age are more comfortable conversing in English. My father, when is freaking mad, doesn't utter a word in Malay. We were once colonised by the British, most people his age studied everything in English, and he lived in England for 9 years, so this is totally comprehensible.

But, in my school, there was definitely one group of students who converse in English, more like Manglish (Malaysian English) in my opinion. They don't feel sophisticated when they don't do so. But what is so sophisticated when every English sentence is accompanied by -lah! or -maa! ?

e.g
Don't be like that -lah!
You know -lah!
Like this -maa! or Like this -lah!

At home I can say that we converse 90 percent in Malay and another 10 percent English. When I asked my father why he didn't train us to speak English, he said that we will learn and embrace English on our own. At home, he rather we speak Malay or the dialect that we cannot learn any where else.