In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who’re challenging to keep pleased in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese ?a roughly equivalent to the total US population ?a read and write English but do not get sufficient top quality spoken practice. The most likely consequence of all this? Within the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.
It is not merely that English is going to be salted with Chinese vocabulary for nearby cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese along with other Asians already pronounce English differently ?a in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. As opposed to “har-muh-nee,” it’s “har-moh-nee.” As well as the sounds that commence words like this and issue are frequently enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (generally known as Singlish), think is pronounced “tink,” and theories is “tee-oh-rees.”