Who do you ignore more: broken English, poor English, or accented English?

Which kind of English will make you want to turn off your listening first? This is regardless of the content of the words (obviously, I'll turn off a racist hatespewing literate County Sommerset person before an ignorant but kind Brooklynite).


For me, it's those who are simply speaking poorly - bad grammar, shitty sentences, etc. If they are speaking ignorantly, I assume they are ignorant, and thus not really worth listening to. Is this is a good assumption? I don't know, and my intent in this post is not to explore the appropriateness or morality of turning people off, only recognizing the truth that it happens, and curiosity about who gets tuned out first by various DUers.


Broken English I don't mind, because I figure "Hey, they don't know the language through any fault of their own, so I should listen more closely to help understand them better".

Accented English doesn't bother me, either (assuming that it is still literate) - Indian, German, Japanese, British, Nigerian, etc., the accent doesn't matter.

How about you?

I try to listen to everybody. Speaking 4 languages myself, I appreciate every attempt, no matter how fragile, on this subject.

Don't mean to be a quim, but do broken English, poor English, and accented English really deserve a personal interrogative pronoun?

Has the English language been conferred personhood?

to fit a grammatically correct sentence while still getting all the options in.

Some were not raised to speak proper English(or American, as the case may be) yet are very intelligent and worth listening to. Broken English: they tried so hard to be able to communicate w/ others so I feel that I should listen to what they have to say. As to accented: doesn't matter where you are from. We all have accents depending on where we were raised. If you've never left your region you would never realize that you speak w/ an accent. I still try to pay attention if the speak is accented. (This is coming from someone who spoke w/ a heavy SE WI accent her first couple of years in MO. Thank goodness I had a teacher originally from MN who took the time to understand me! Many of my teachers either corrected me outright or told me to slow down since no one speaks that fast. Now when I visit my family back home they ask me to speed up and quit speaking w/ such an accent!)

...trying to fix Internet access problems. I have a high tolerance for accents and poor English, but I'm pretty quick to identify a speaker with whom I'm not going to be able to work productively. For these folks, we have translators available, and account reps in their countries who are bilingual.

I still get a kick out of my customers at red-blooded American companies who open trouble tickets, and when I call to get details tell me, "Let me put my tech on the phone," and it's someone whom I can barely understand. That's funny. Not for them, of course, as it slows down the troubleshooting process, but it is a funny and sad point about our technological arrogance.

yet I sometimes find myself speaking slang in certain situations. I noticed it during water aerobics yesterday. I was using the word "ain't" and I'm not even sure why. :shrug: When I'm using slang, my tone of voice changes, too.

However, a work colleague once berated me for using formal language and a large vocabulary. Okay, I think I figured it out: I have different "modes" of communication. For some humor, I use slang. For formal situations, I use formal language. The rest of the time, my speech is somewhere in between. :shrug:

Paradoxically, my mind shuts off first when I hear someone using poor grammar, especially when speaking should be formal. Whassup wif dat? :wtf:

But I will tell you what does bother me. The content of what the person says--- or lack of. I really have a hard time having much respect for an adult who has no curiosity and no real knowledge of what is going in the world or even in their community, nor any interest at all in knowing. I work with a gal who is like this. She is an expert at shopping, rating movies and other frivolous pursuits. She has no clue what is going on in the world nor does she care as long as she can keep shopping and doing all the frivolous things she likes to do. She is never interested in any current event unless it affects her directly in ability to shop. You cannot have an intelligent conversation with her. :eyes:

I don't mind people whop prattle on if they have something interesting to prattle on about.

But prattlers usually aren't actually conversing; they're "telling". And that sucks.

Especially those who have no interest in the world around them, other than what people are buying, gossip about others, or only stuff that affects them directly.