It Is Easy to Learn to Speak English Poorly
by Yehuda Kovesh MD (London), FRAI (London)
A Frenchman’s Remark
A French academician once observed:
“English is a language that is relatively easy to speak poorly.”
And indeed, with its two hundred thousand words, English can be spoken intelligibly using only two hundred. Consider the travel agents in Vietnam who hang signs proclaiming “We speak English” yet manage only the simplest exchange:
“How much is the bus ticket to Ho Chi Minh City?”
“Ten dollars.”
The Many Variants of “English”
There are countless versions of English that jar the ear — for instance, the curious “Singlish” of Singapore. Yet the best and worst English I have heard has not come from Asia at all, but from countries where it is native: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia — and from India, where English occupies a unique space.
In India, English is both a colonial inheritance and a tool of brilliance: while many speak it poorly, some of the finest and most precise speakers of English I have ever met were Indian.
Across Asia, linguistic divisions often mirror social ones. In Malaysia, for example, Indians generally speak English better than the Chinese, who in turn speak it better than the Malays. In barely a century, English has dethroned French as the language of international discourse.
The Rise and Decline of French
For centuries, French was the language of the educated classes across Europe, the Near East, and the Far East — everywhere except the British colonies. Its decline may have come from complacency. Many French speakers, secure in their linguistic superiority, failed to learn other languages, thereby losing curiosity about the wider world.
I often observe a similar smugness in English-speaking societies — in the UK, the US, and Australia — where monolingualism is the norm. I admire a Vietnamese or Khmer who speaks to me in English: for them, it is a second or third language. But in much of the Anglophone world, learning another tongue is considered unnecessary.
Multilingual Virtues
In Malaysia, Indians and Chinese are typically trilingual: they speak Malay, English, and their ancestral tongue — Tamil, Hokkien, Cantonese, or Mandarin. (Tamil is as distinct from Bengali as Greek is from Swedish.)
Ironically, immigrant parents often discourage their children from speaking their native language at home, fearing it will hinder their success — a phenomenon common among Mexican families in the United States. Meanwhile, indigenous languages fade in Australia and the US, and regional dialects have nearly vanished in France.
The Beloved Language
Those struggling with French pronunciation and grammar may find comfort in knowing that more than sixty percent of English vocabulary is French in origin. Alexandre Dumas once said, “English is all French, just pronounced differently.”
A BBC documentary traced the gradual evolution of English — from its British and Breton roots through waves of Saxon and Norman conquest, which left a flood of French words embedded in its structure.
If one knows even three thousand English words, one can speak it remarkably well. The New York Times once noted that the average English speaker uses only six hundred unique words daily — a humbling thought.
The Music of Language
I love the Spanish language: ornate, sensual, descriptive. Yet a well-written English passage can be equally mesmerizing. Who could resist lines like these from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:
Y sabré acariciar las nuevas flores
Porque tú me enseñaste la ternura.
And I shall know how to touch the new flowers gently,
Because you taught me tenderness.
The Future of English
There are now more non-native speakers of English than native ones. Some say this means English is “dying” — not in vitality, but in ownership. The native speakers of the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa are now vastly outnumbered by those learning it across China, India, and beyond.
Many of today’s finest English writers are not native speakers. India alone has produced a remarkable literary lineage — from Amitav Ghosh and Kiran Desai to Pankaj Mishra and Jhumpa Lahiri.
The Caribbean too has enriched English letters: Trinidad gave us V. S. Naipaul, St Lucia gave us Derek Walcott — both Nobel laureates. India, though having only one Nobel laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore, will surely produce more.
The flourishing of literature remains one of the clearest signs of a society’s civilisation. Indonesia, for instance, teems with fine writers; Malaysia and Singapore, less so — a telling commentary on their cultural priorities.
The Evolution of Words
Before 1600, revolution referred solely to the motion of celestial bodies. Before Hans Selye published his study of stress in 1953, the term belonged to mechanical engineering. And as for joie de vivre — the English language, ever playful, turned it into gay.
Epilogue
Yes — it is easy to learn to speak English poorly.
But to speak it well — to shape it with grace, precision, and warmth — is to wield one of humanity’s most extraordinary tools of connection.
