I see many fluent English speakers do this. Meaning, when speaking English to an immigrant whose grasp of English is pretty poor, they themselves also speak a sort of broken English, similar to the way the immigrant themself speaks.
Is there any reason to do this? Does the fact that the listener speaks that way indicate that they would also understand that type of language better than they would a fuller and more correct way of speaking? Or is it just some psychological thing on the part of the speaker, with no basis in fact?
When I travel,I often run across people I depend upon, whose English is not native or fluent. I’ve learned over the years to form basic subject-verb-object sentences, keep them short with periods instead of wandering and dangling clauses. Mostly, I’ve become adept at speaking with regular verbs, and avoiding the ones that are confusingly irregular. I speak slowly, with clear breaks between the words, instead of “Jeet chet?” (Did you eat yet?")
If I’m trying to communicate in a language that is not my own, I appreciate it if people speak to me the same way in their language, which gives me a fighting chance of understanding it.
If someone started speaking to me in broken English, I probably would make word choices that I wouldn’t normally make, to maximize the likelihood of being understood. I don’t think my grammar would change so I don’t think “broken English” would be the best descriptor. But it wouldn’t be my normal speaking style.
I’m learning Italian in preparation for a vacation I’m planning for later this year. I’ve never been good at foreign languages, but I don’t want to be an ugly American. For my sake, I hope the people I meet are thoughtful enough to choose words that an obvious novice would know. I also hope they won’t speak so so fast that I can’t figure out what’s being said.
As someone whose ability to speak Spanish far outways his ability to understand it (especially when they are speaking a million words a minute), I appreciate when they speak broken Spanglish to me.
I think of it as a kind of code-switching: changing to a simpler vocabulary, simple sentences. I do this sometimes for native English speakers who have communication difficulties due to stroke, lack of education, intellectual disabilities, and so forth. I am certainly willing to do this for new English speakers.
My Dad used to joke that people first learned “Broken English and fluent profanity.”
I try and speak as normally as possible, though I understand YMMV. People understand languages a lot better than they can speak them. Also I have noticed native English speakers (of which I am not one) sometimes try and become more “conversational” which I think it counterproductive. Most people who learn a second language learn the more formal version. Paradoxically the more “big words you use”, the more you might be understood.
I once dealt with a Frenchman. If I said “we will need clear and convincing evidence before we are satisfied with the veracity of the claims”, he understood me no problem. “Pass the butter?:” Blank look on his face.
One thing which really pisses me off is when talking Japanese to someone if they notice that I’m not perfect and then they try to speak broken Japanese to me. I can understand fluent Japanese a hell of a lot better than broken Japanese.
With people who are speaking truly broken English, I’ll slow down and simplify.
I was in school with a guy who worked in Japan, where part of his job was translating English into Broken English (‘Jinglish’) so that his bosses could read it.
In his case, Broken English was Japanese grammer with some Japanese words and spellings and loan words.
I would think that speaking loadly with a funny accent (which is what some people do when they are not understood) is unlikely to help.
Also, I was taken aback to read in some training material that when speaking to deaf people "enunciating more clearly’ was not helpful. The training material went on to explain that most people, when they “enunciate more clearly”, do nothing of the sort. They just draw out their vowel sounds and make the vowel sounds louder. That doesn’t help.
At a previous job, one of our salesmen / trainers had an annoying habit related to this. He had lived in Hong Kong, several years before. When speaking to any Asian customer, he spoke broken English with an accent like a stereotypical Chinese character speaking English in a movie. I found it embarrassing, though I never found out if his victims were annoyed by this.
Speaking broken English helps if the listener has a limited English vocabulary. I recall one fellow who only grasped “is” as the verb “to be”, so I had to say to him “You is right” because he’d get thrown by “You are right”.
That might work with Romance language speakers, but not non-Romance language speakers. The “big words” in your first sentence are Latinate, and so are likely to have cognates in Romance languages. A German speaker is going to understand your 2nd sentence much more easily, since the “little, everyday words” in English tend to be Germanic in origin.
Also, I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that people can understand languages better than they can speak them. They might be able to READ other languages better, but listening to native speaker, speaking at full speed and using idiomatic phrases is much more difficult that speaking.
I tutor adult English language learners. If someone lacks knowledge and command of English vocabulary and grammar, it can be necessary to vastly simplify your speech. “You go store?” might have some chance of being understood, whereas, “Did you go to the store?” might be perceived as a jumble of sounds. Many English language learners have difficulty with tenses, articles, prepositions… Omitting or simplifying them allows an individual to still communicate at a basic level. Once they develop that ability, they can work on improving their fluency.
The less English the listener knows the better that works. Also useful for people who are just pretending they don’t understand English or who seem to have developed a sudden hearing or comprehension problem.
I’ve noticed this and it can be terribly cringeworthy and embarrassing.
One thing I do myself, however, is to try to choose words that I know have direct equivalents in the other language - for example if I’m describing a problem to a French speaker who has limited English, instead of “it is hard”, I will say “It is difficult”, because I know that French has the equivalent word difficile.
It’s one of the many ways which fall under the umbrella of “changing the register”. If someone asks what kind of research did I do in graduate school, I ask how much chemistry do they know; I don’t expect an accountant to know what a phenilene is, but I do expect a chemist to know it. Conversely, often when I’m speaking with the folks from the Treasury I have to remind them that I’m an engineer and to me “passive activity” is an oxymoron, can they explain it please? (Turns out it means “expenses”).
It is quite normal; people generally understand languages (including their own) better than they use them. You can figure out a word from context; inventing one on the fly and happening to hit the right one is a lot less likely. Now, when you start adding gunfire speech or horrid accents, that’s a different issue: it’s not a problem with the receiver’s understanding, but with the emitter’s mode of expression.