‘See I talk a little fast, but if you listen real fast, I aint gotta slow down for you to catch up BITCH.’ — 50 Cent
An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese. (…)
The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. (…) English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored.
