Anglophone

Being an anglophone is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you speak perfectly the world's most useful language. But on the other, no one wants to speak anything else with you - making foreign language acquisition difficult.

The Italian language dies a little every time an anglophone orders "a panini".

Being an anglophone is a double-edged sword. On the one hand you speak the world's most useful language perfectly, but then no one wants to talk with you in another language, which makes the process of learning foreign languages more difficult.

When he was a child, a former Prime Minister of Canada, whose father was a francophone from Quebec and whose mother was an anglophone, supposed that all boys spoke French with their fathers and English with their mothers.

A Japanese student learning English stayed at my house in Canada for five years. By now, he has just forgotten most of his English. It is like that way for Anglophone Canadians with French. Most Japanese just forget their English.

In the morning of the 27th of February of 2022, on my way out of my Lulu Island house, I saw my neighbours the redhead Rochelle of Russian-Mennonite ancestry and the grey-haired moustached Al from the Anglophone section of Montreal; he was from many generations of Canadians. He said that he did not know French, when he lived in Montreal. I ate a slice of pesto cheese pizza at the pizzeria. The vendor was from Mumbai. Through the window, I could see a young brown-blond-haired man in a dark-grey hooded jacket and blue shorts, which made him look like a "big boy." At the cafe, there was an under-age-30 crowd of ten outside, of whom one looked like a handsome Jew. Inside was a table of five or six over-age-30 people, of whom one was a handsome tomboy in a dark-green jacket and army-green pants. I drank my iced black tea. Heading out of the cafe, I saw the "big boy" smoking in the wooded park. I took the long route home, through the grassy school field littered with goose poop, the northern snowcapped mountains obscured by clouds, an Animistic-Buddhistic view seemingly of a different planet. Near my house, parked in a truck were Olivia and Daniel. Olivia was studying Biochemistry. In the back seat of the truck was a fully black German Shepherd.

Nigeria may be an Anglophone country, but festival organizer Serge Noukoue said it makes sense to hold the festival in the French capital.

There is such a thing as "Filipino English." Most Filipinos cannot pronounce English the way Americans do. So, when they speak English, they speak with a Filipino accent. There are also special local words that creep into it. Such includes food words like "hopia" and "pancit." But most of the time, the archipelagic lingua franca is really Taglish, the patois of code-switching between Tagalog and English. Filipinos reserve speaking pure English when Anglophone foreigners are present.

The nature of the Germanic-Mediterranean dichotomy of English vocabulary seems still a novelty for many people, including my neighbours, the Wongs, who are multiracial from Fiji, once a British colony. The more educated an Anglophone is, the more acrolectal Mediterranean is the vocabulary. The less educated an Anglophone is, the more basilectal Germanic is the vocabulary. The late inventor, Buckminster Fuller, was very experimental in his English writing, as he concocted new-fangled words from Mediterranean and Germanic roots. He thought that using words only found in the dictionary was like living in a prison.

The first language I learned was Spanish but since I was born and grew up in an Anglophone country, I constantly hear more English than Spanish and my skill has degraded somewhat, so, do I even qualify as a native speaker?