who is a native English speaker?
Source: Trending News Room; AfriqueMonAfrique;
Apart
from the desire for knowledge, information is also important to guide
us on the right part in judgment and decision making which is what has
brought us to this point today. After arriving China, I saw that so many
Chinese knew so little about life outside the middle kingdom. To worsen
the matter, to them color was a factor that
I have been asked hundreds of times are you an English native speaker? The question became so frequent that I began to ask myself; who is a native speaker? According Wikipedia, a native speaker is a person who grew up with a particular language as their mother tongue. Thefreedictionary.com helped make the definition even clearer. It defined a native speaker as a speaker of a particular language who has spoken that language since early childhood.
Being a native speaker is not about color.
If the above definitions are correct, I will not be wrong to say that anyone who grew up in China and learnt Chinese from early Childhood irrespective of his/her color is a native Chinese speaker.
British, who are often seen as the true owners of English, were the ones who explored and colonized most countries in Africa. Outside Africa, Britain also colonized Canada, the U.S, Bahamas and many more. The little problem between the English spoken by the British and many of the countries they colonized comes from accent, not grammatical structure. Even within Great Britain, accents differ as you travel from north to south, city to city, and in some cases from neighborhood to neighborhood.
In sociolinguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation. Accent is important but it’s not the most important thing as long as communication is concerned. No matter what type or how strong of an accent you have, if the person you are communicating with can’t understand you, communication has not taken place.
Being a native speaker is not about accent.
Most African countries that were colonized by the British were allowed to retain their local dialect and at the same time adopted English as their major language. Take Nigeria as an example; it’s a country with over 300 local dialects, the only way to understand each other is to speak in English. This is the same case in South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, and several others.
Like the Chinese ‘Chinglish’ or Nigerian ‘broken English-pidgin’, Bernard Sabiti, a Ugandan cultural commentator, has recorded colloquialisms of Ugandan English Uglish, which is also the name of his new book that attempts to unlock what he calls “one of the funniest and strangest English varieties in the world.”
Having gotten to this point, the big question now is which countries in the world are the best English speakers?
If you were in a position to rate the best English speaking countries in the world, which countries would you have selected? welcome to leave your comments with us to let us hear your voice.
Source: Trending News Room; AfriqueMonAfrique;
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