Jan 28 2008
Pinoy English
A friend of mine, a fellow Filipina who grew up in the Philippines like me, once told me that her son now that he’s a bit older, has started correcting her English grammar. Her son, being born here in the US, has learned the English language so well that now, he has the audacity to say , “that’s wrong grammar Mommy..”.
I have other friends who have children who would laugh at them when they commit some grammar booboos. One time, we visited a friend and his family, both Philippine born, but whose two children were born here. They had a guy come in to do the measurements for their new blinds. Our friend, the father, cheerfully said to the guy, ” Hi guy, how are you doing ? “. I don’t know why he said it, but for whatever reason he did and so his 9 -year old daughter said, ” did you just say, Hi guy, Daddy ?” and she was laughing so hard in front of all of us, even if the guy was right there behind us. I had to hush her to stop her from making fun at her dad.
My son is only two years old and I know that time will come when he would also laugh at my Filipino kind of English. I try hard to be always grammatically correct but you know it’s not our language and so there are times when we would really slip and we forget that the verbs and the nouns should agree and all those things, singular, plural, whatever. We forget what is the correct pronunciation too, or the right “twang” or how to say it exactly as the Americans do and the worst part is forgetting the right word to use. My friend’s daughter would laugh at how her mom would say, “awesome”. She laughed at me how I said “Google ” (googool?) .
I just hope that when my son grows up, he won’t catch my grammar, diction, pronunciation or whatever errors because I will lose my credibility if that happens. But if he ever does catch me “murdering” the English language, he’d just have to excuse my kind of English because I wasn’t born in the USA like them , right?
