After seeing the Katrina anniversary coverage this week, it appears that few children in New Orleans can speak English either. Their dialect was unintelligible. I wonder how teachers could understand those who evacuated to other parts of the US after the storm.
For what it’s worth, I was in Mexico City on the metro yesterday, and tried to listen to the kiddos talk, it wouldn’t pass any litmus test of the Real Academia Langague Art of Madrid Spain, it was street lingo, and quite regional slang to the riff raff of Mexico City. Try riding in a taxi and understand the code words they use in Mexico. Some of this, will just happen. Wasn’t there a movie made about MY FAIR LADY of a guy who proved he could take a street girl and make her into a fit for an evening with the queen by just changing her speech?
“After seeing the Katrina anniversary coverage this week, it appears that few children in New Orleans can speak English either.”
This sentence implies that the children saw the coverage. The following would be clearer:
“Having seen the coverage ... I have the impression that...”
I used to supervise a call center for a Canadian company. They had two call centers; one in Denver and one in Vancouver, BC. The Vancouver call center took calls from Canada while the Denver call center took calls from the USA.
In time, they developed the cost-saving software to enable both call centers to take calls from both countries. We had a high percentage of callers who not only spoke ebonics, but spoke the "Dirty South" dialect of ebonics and the Canadians who answered their calls simply could not understand a single word they were saying! Those of us taking calls in America were a little bit more familiar with this dialect but those poor Canadians didn't have a clue! They were always transferring these callers to our call center hoping that an American might be able to better help them out.