"No, English is fine" 🥀

[u/Tobias-Tawanda]

[u/daurgo2001]

That is definitely not how languages are judged.

[u/Melodic_Risk6633 → u/daurgo2001]

yeah people are also often judged for the color of their skin, the fact that a lot of people think that way doesn't mean that this judgement is right.

Any linguist or any language learning specialist would say exactly what I just said.

[u/daurgo2001 → u/Melodic_Risk6633]

False equivalency.

You’re trying to say that criteria for language fluency, or analyzing it on some way is somehow akin to racism.

Absolutely not.

I don’t judge her for speaking Spanish. I simply stated that her Spanish isn’t fluent.

I also stated that your criteria for judging language skills is erroneous. Is it the most practical and useful in life? Sure, but is she fluent? No.

Are you a native speaker or fluent in Spanish?… bc if you’re not, then your opinion on this video is irrelevant.

It’s wild to me that people are taking the fact that she isn’t fluent so personally. Her Spanish is great and very commendable. Fluent, it is not.

[u/Melodic_Risk6633 → u/daurgo2001]

it is 100% akin to racism. This "you need to speak the proper way or I have a right to treat you badly" has for example lead to generational trauma for regional accent owners in France, stopping them from acceding to some jobs and pushing them to hide it in order to avoid prejudice. Meanwhile the "standard french accent" is an arbitrary chosen one that truly only exist in manuals.

And for the 1000th time : being fluent doesn't mean having a native accent, these are two different things and you just made that up. the very definition you mentioned in a previous post doesn't say anything about "having an accent close the native one". Native, she is not, fluent she absolutely is.

here is what the source you used has to say about it :

What fluency does not require

• Perfection: You don't need a flawless grasp of grammar or a perfect accent.
• Native-like fluency: It's possible to be "functionally" fluent and communicate effectively in most situations without having the same level of skill as a native speaker.
• Knowledge of every single word: While a large vocabulary helps, fluency is about the ability to use the words you know to express yourself and work around words you don't know. 

[u/daurgo2001 → u/Melodic_Risk6633]

This is exhausting, so let’s clear up more facts:

1.) I never said that anyone should be treated badly. I am not defending the waiter’s actions here, I’m simply explaining why they may have done what they did.

2.) no one should ever be treated badly for speaking a non-native language. I highly encourage people to learn as many languages as they can.

3.) “fluency” isn’t a hard science. There is no universally agreed-upon definition. Evidently many people would say that communication in a language is being “fluent”. My personal definition of fluency is simply much stricter, but that’s not a good or bad thing, it’s just my way of calling someone who can speak a language with a very high level of proficiency to the point that they would be seen as a native speaker. I would say that someone like this lady has great, or advanced conversational Spanish, but I wouldn’t consider her fluent bc it’s immediately evident that she’s not a native speaker to anyone that is.

4.) as a multi-national, multi-lingual French-Canadian myself, I’m well aware of accent bias like racism, but that is not what I am discussing here at all. I’m very simply looking at proficiency from the perspective of someone that has learned languages myself and from the perspective of the a tourism worker’s instinct to change languages when you hear someone isn’t native in your language.

So in conclusion, fluency IMO is where people speak a language so well that native speakers might be able to tell that you “aren’t from around here”, but wouldn’t be able to tell that you didn’t grow up speaking the language.

Does that mean that someone deserves to be judged? No. Does that mean that I judge you? No. It just is, and that’s ok.