Background: I have a large number of relatives living in Singapore and Malaysia (my family is Malaysian Chinese, one of my aunts-- the eldest in my mum’s family-- is a Singaporean citizen but I have three other cousins from that side living there to work. Most of my extended family on both sides live in Malaysia.)
My relatives can all speak English at various levels and speak three different Chinese languages (mostly Cantonese even though my family isn’t Cantonese). Four of my cousins speak very broken English-- especially two younger ones who are a ten-year-old boy and eleven-year-old girl, not siblings but live together in the same house. To give you an idea, when I talk to either of them on Skype the conversation tends to go something like this:
Me: Hi how are you?
Cousin: I very happy (or “I am fine”, which isn’t broken-- their English has improved a bit).
Me: What are you doing?
Cousin: I watching television (or playing games)
A few months back I had a friend over at my house to catch up. Somehow we ended up talking about our relatives (she’d been to Luxembourg to visit hers last year). She told me that she thought broken English was endearing and cute. Googling it tells me a lot of people share that opinion.
Why is this? I thought that it may to do with the fact that people consider babies and toddlers (and younger children) to be cute. When some children learn to speak standard English they’re just learning how to pronounce words and form sentences-- and since babies and young kids are cute, broken English is cute.
Has anyone else come across this opinion before? Why do you think some English-speaking people think broken English is cute?
I don’t think of ‘it’ as being especially ‘cute’. In essence it’s just a rather, compressed, dialect.
Still perfectly comprehensible, compare some written English from the verbose Victorian era with modern English and you get the idea.
Peter
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
it forces the fluent speaker to interact as though with a child.
[/QUOTE]
Mangetout nailed it.
Children are cute. In any language, and in any culture.
Children are especially cute at the age of 2-3 when they start talking.
So anybody speaking broken English, (or any language) brings out the child in you, and you can respond in “baby talk”, too.
Cute!
Except, of course for situations where broken English is very much not cute:
Say, you are in a foreign country dealing with the police on a serious matter.
Have to agree with you there Bridget. Thing is often I can understand my cousins (except for that time one of them said she was “going to eat food and aunt.”)
I never thought about it, but I’ll agree with the other two posters, it’s sort of ‘baby talk’ in a way and people like that. If it’s coming from a ‘cute’ female or a ‘grandma/grandpa’ it’s going to sound cute.
Also, I’m not sure if it was on purpose or not but in both of your examples the English is broken because they dropped (or never put in) the verb “to be” [am] which I’m lead to understand some languages don’t have so in their heads the sentences sounded just fine.
It’s about being patronizing to the person that speaks it, just like you can be patronizing to a baby. The assumption is that a person who speaks in a broken version of your language is something like a baby - not to be taken seriously but to be taken care of by you. The fact that you can’t speak their language at all is ignored. Your language is taken as being a “real” language, while theirs is some minor thing that you have no obligation to speak.
I have what I call, “The Canvas Sack Theory”, (as a straight man) namely that there are women who are so breathtakingly attractive that they could cut out holes for their arms and neck in a canvas sack, wearing it as a dress and it would look good. Doughbag’s comment is the verbal equivalent of that. Something different done by someone endearing will be endearing.
Back in the 1980s there was a popular cooking show featuring Martin Yan, a fellow of Chinese ancestry, cooking Asian dishes in broken English. It was popular among the cooking show crowd in the Bay Area. His Chinese audience loudly complained that since he could speak regular American English that he should and was something of an embarrassment, but that didn’t stop my Chinese cooking friends from watching him.
I work in a professional environment with lots of immigrant engineers reporting to me. I find nothing endearing about broken English whatsoever. It might be cute at the grocery store or restaurant, but in a conference call on a $10M project, it’s just frustrating.
I constantly strain to understand difficult accents. I put so much effort into simply understanding what they’re trying to say that it often seems to me that the logic centre of my brain is not engaged. In other words, with great effort, I might comprehend that an engineer is proposing to vacuum rate an atmospheric tank, however I’m too focused on understanding his words to contemplate them and immediately shut him down because it’s a stupid idea.
I’ve actually considered changing my outgoing voicemail to “don’t leave a message - email me”, since I’ve got guys whose accents and grammar are so bad that I literally have to listen to their messages 5 times if I want to figure out what they said. Typically, as soon as I hear certain voices, I give them “33-7” and then email them. At least with the email, I can read it over and over and try to figure out what they’re talking about.
In every language I have learned, I have found that people just love the fact that you are making the effort and taking an interest. Right now, with Romanian: they love it. Everyone wants to teach me funny things and tongue twisters, they ask me to pronounce things and on and on.
I feel it with Dutch, even more than with English. If someone wants to learn Dutch I think “huh, why would anyone want to learn Dutch?!”, but then, just the fact that they do is really endearing. It makes me want to help them in their attempts, to explain the difficult grammar and hold their hand 'round the “g”-sound. Maybe like a child, yes, but it’s partially their interest that makes it so cute.
ETA: Vulnerability! Forget to say that! Speaking a language you struggle with makes you feel, and seem, vulnerable. You might end up looking pretty silly! So we want to comfort people, and help them.
I think that this is it. There is the hot-Foreign Babe stereotype-e.g., Charo, Lupe Velez, Nancy Kwan(?)…you get hot babes like that, and, yes, the broken English is cute. I’ve had some foreign gfs who not only were cute when they tried to speak in broken English, but, it only made me more attracted to them. My next door neighbor, a fat Mexican male, who speaks broken English…not even close to cute when he does it. As a matter of fact, I want to pop him on the mouth when he speaks, and tell him to quit jabbering-even though he is a totally great person/neighbor.