Caitlin Green
1 min readApr 12, 2020

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I’m a linguist, and I wholeheartedly support this response. Funny or not, this article supports the kind of attitude that makes people feel inferior and discourages valuable voices from speaking. This article goes the farthest I’ve seen in a while, and as a person who speaks five languages and used to teach Latin, I’m happy to tell dczook that I LITERALLY COULD NOT CARE LESS how “correctly” someone pronounces loanwords from any of those languages in English, because the thing that makes loanwords cool is how much the host language adjusts it along all kinds of interesting dimensions, NOT how slavishly the speaker conforms to the language of origin. I’m not interested in hearing someone say kah-rah-oh-keh any more than I want to hear them pronounce the French loanword “table” as tah-bluh. That’s not how English works, my dude.

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Caitlin Green
Caitlin Green

Written by Caitlin Green

PhD in linguistics, writing about cultural discourses, analyzing discourse in interaction. @caitlinmoriah on Twitter

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