Donald Trump praised Liberian President Joseph Boakai for his strong grasp of the English language on Wednesday. But the African leader was educated in Liberia, where English is the official language.
As he hosted five African leaders at the White House, Trump asked Boakai: “Such good English, it’s beautiful. Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?”
Boakai informed Trump of his place of education, prompting Trump to express his curiosity. “That’s very interesting,” he said, “I have people at this table who can’t speak nearly as well.”
Several Liberians voiced their offense over Trump’s comment to Boakai, given the US president’s past remarks on African countries and the colonial legacy left by the US organization in Liberia.
“I felt insulted because our country is an English-speaking country,” Archie Tamel Harris, a Liberian youth advocate, told CNN.
Saying a black person is “well spoken” is such a common slight in the US, as if it should be surprising somehow that they’re not all speaking Jive or Hip-hop or whatever. If people insult African-Americans like that what hope do Liberians have?
Just go to any streamer channel. Kick, Twitch YouTube and you will see how most americans trash the English language. I understand that language evolves, but come on now. Worst is tense. They have no clue of what past, present and future tense is in speaking English.
Believe me, it’s not just Americans. No one outside of English nobility speaks anywhere near “the King’s English”. And no one should feel like they have to. Honestly, some English accents are significantly less intelligible than those that learned it as a foreign language. As long as the giver and receivers understand what’s being said, then I see no real problems.
I am an anomaly. I was brought up by my mother, a British WWII war bride who married a Canadian soldier and moved to Canada with him. She would only let me speak the “Queen‘s English“. Oh, and I had to watch Jeopardy every single day for eight years.
I was not even allowed to use contractions.
The worst part was that she never taught me the rules that allowed me to speak very well, but I could not explain how I spoke very well. Got me in quite a bit of trouble when younger.
I guess knowing tense and other stuff exists it saddens me that people are no longer as descriptive and personal as they used to be decades ago.
Well, that’s… definitely interesting. Don’t quite know what to say about that.
This quote from Chris Rock hasn’t aged too well, but the overall sentiment is correct.
Well… he could definitely be less correct.
Also, it implies that you can’t be well spoken while using aave which is plain wrong. Reducing a valid sociolect to some kind of hood mumbo jumbo is just another way to keep the people who use it down.
Indeed. This sort of thing goes way back - the term “barbarian” was literally a result of Romans making fun of how non-Roman languages sounded to them (they used the onomatopoeia of “Bar Bar” to represent what they thought foreign languages sounded to them). Dismiss their language as meaningless gibber and you dismiss their thoughts as meaningless too.
This was the Greeks, not the Romans. It was used to describe non-Greek-speaking people.
The Romans took it up from the Greek “barbaros” and expanded it in meaning to include anyone without Greek or Roman traditions.
Shibboleth and all that, language has always been a tool of power and domination, sorting in-group vs out-group.
Well put. If a man can’t respect his fellow citizens, what’s going to make him respect those that aren’t?
trump and his pops has always been racist to any blacks. on his show, the people who used to work for the reality series, said he complains about black people winning.
It’s an extraordinarily racist and ignorant posture to take. African American Vernacular English is a widely known dialect at this point and is really interesting to learn about.