On Not Having a Mother Tongue
At the moment, I'm TA-ing for a course called Language and Power here at the University of Oregon, and I've been recounting the following story to my students. It happened more than 10 years ago after I'd just moved from Singapore to Melbourne. I was at my university orientation, where I met a number of people, including a guy from Sweden. We got to talking, and he eventually asked me what languages I spoke. I told him that I spoke English and some Chinese (Mandarin), but that my Chinese wasn't very good. The very next thing he said to me was, "Oh, so you don't speak any language well!" Before I could recover from the shock of what he'd just said, he quickly proceeded to 'correct' my English. I remember we were talking about purchasing textbooks for our courses at a particular bookshop. I said something like: " You can get them cheap over there." He told me that it should be: "You can get them cheaply over there." ...