Girl on the Net
girlonthenet@mastodon.social
I see racists are doing "did you know X% of kids in Glasgow/London/Birmingham don't have English as a first language!?" bullshit again.
BILINGUAL. The word you're looking for to smack them down is 'bilingual'. Most children who 'don't have English as a first language' have two languages. Sometimes more! Why do you hate this? It's fucking beautiful!
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Girl on the Net
girlonthenet@mastodon.socialOne of the things that made me fall in love with London was a visit to Sainsbury's in Whitechapel a couple of weeks after I'd arrived. I always swore I'd leave London quickly - it was dirty and smelly and busy and stressful. But I grew to love it pretty quickly, not least because when you have so many people in one place, people suddenly become endlessly fascinating.
Anyway. Sainsbury's.
A lad was scanning a lady's shopping through the checkout, got to the end and asked her something. 🧵
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Girl on the Net
girlonthenet@mastodon.socialCan't remember what, probably 'do you have a Nectar card?' or sthing. The lady was quite old, and wearing niqab, so he couldn't see her face, but she just tilted her head to the side like she didn't understand and this kid immediately switched language and asked again.
Another head tilt.
And he asked again, this time in a new language.
She got it, and chatted back to him.
Blew my mind, honestly. This kid who was working a shift in Sainsbury's was just CASUALLY TRILINGUAL.
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Girl on the Net
girlonthenet@mastodon.socialAs someone who'd grown up in a place with very little immigration, then spent a couple of years abroad struggling to learn as much of the language as I could to get by, it absolutely floored me that I now lived in a city where people working the checkout in Sainsbury's could casually switch languages just to make it easier for an old lady to get her Nectar points or whatever.
What an astonishingly beautiful thing.
What a gift!
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@girlonthenet this reminds me of when I went to the "bad neighborhood" of Bilbao and a guy spoke to me in five different languages. He was trying to sell me drugs, but still. That's a level of customer friendly that a multinational corporation can only dream of
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Quixoticgeek
quixoticgeek@v.st
@girlonthenet something a lot of people from English speaking countries forget is that globally, being multilingual is the norm, not the exception.
In the UK we should be teaching a second language from a much earlier age.
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Girl on the Net
girlonthenet@mastodon.socialYears later, an older relative spouted some bullshit at me about how 'X% of kids in London don't speak English as a first language!' and I told her this story.
Gently informing her that 'English as a second language', when you LIVE in the UK and are being educated in the school system, doesn't mean you can't speak English - it means you're bilingual.
I am in awe of kids who grow up bi- or multi-lingual, and I wish I'd had the same opportunity. It's a valuable skill and should be celebrated.
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Rina Volpina 🦊🔞
RinaVolpina@rubber.social@girlonthenet I was extremely lucky to have a globetrotting childhood and went to a “manadatorily bilingual” secondary school. My friends and I code switched constantly, and had fun confusing tourists by pretending we couldn’t speak their language (sorry! 😅)
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Girl on the Net
girlonthenet@mastodon.social@RinaVolpina haha brilliant =) I am so envious that you have two languages! That is very cool!
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3A29, raspberry pi in a fox
3a29@gts.apicrim.es@girlonthenet @RinaVolpina this one grew up with a trilingual mother and (unfortunately) a monolingual father, and while at one point they did want to raise us multilingual it never ended up happening
which is a shame, because knowing german would have been very useful for existing in the kind of weird kinky hacker scene it seems to have found itself in.
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MidgePhoto
Photo55@mastodon.social@schratze @girlonthenet in Naples, allegedly, one may be mugged in a wide selection of languages.
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@Photo55 @girlonthenet that's the thing. It's always "allegedly". Nobody ever actually gets mugged. White people are just uncomfortable around brown and black folks and start spinning stories.
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Charlotte/Cinny 
charlotte
@schratze @Photo55 @girlonthenet it is said that racists would prefer getting mugged in one language only instead of being around people that aren’t going to mug them but speak a foreign language that isn’t european
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