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Video Analysis: American Tongues

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For my own understanding, the quote means that English is the only language that attracts other languages, then combines with these languages, and later assimilates these languages to become English. I do not agree with this quote, because on the part of combining and assimilating other languages, all languages work the same, not only English. For example, in Mandarin, the word “fans”(followers) pronounced as “fen si.” This word is obviously borrowed from English and then became its own word in Mandarin. The best example is not Mandarin, but is Japanese. In comparison to English, if there is only one language that is the “black hole,” then it got to be Japanese. In Japanese, there are many borrowed words from English and also other languages, and even the native speakers of these languages would not be able to recognize the word that “became” Japanese. For example, “McDonald” in Japanese became similar to “Makunadonludo,” and “interesting” became “intoresudingu.” …show more content…

First, the positive reason is that the people who knows the local dialect can fit into the local community easily. For example, there is a man in the video talks about that they have their own way to interact with each other, which is different from how the “outsider” act. As a result, knowing the dialect will help out the communication in such situation. Then here are the negative reasons of having a local dialect. First, it is harder to get into the other community. For example, the woman at the beginning of the video said she traveled a lot, but these people in different places laughed at her and guessed where she is from all the time. Secondly, some of them is not understandable for the other people, for example, there is a man in the video talks about that sometimes he cannot understand what the people from Mississippi and Georgia is talking about. These are some of the positive and negative reasons within the

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