I Love Your English

I love your English.

I love how you speak. I love when you switch one word for another. I love how you try on accents and word order. I love the sound of your voice as you turn sounds and patterns from your language into mine. I love how you accidentally say scandalous things and we laugh not because you embarrassed yourself but because language tricks us all. Language is a game like tag--someone, somewhere made up the rules and it’s silly and we can break them and you just did and how silly those rules were in the first place. 

I love how you write. I love your “broken” sentences. I love the surprising choice of periods and commas. I love that sentences don’t always have clear beginnings or endings. I love how the point isn’t correctness but the idea. I love how an idea can come through in the barest construction of words. I love the meaning you convey in your hands and body and how that somehow also comes out in your writing in English.

I love how you say what you mean. I love that there is not enough artifice in your vocabulary to hide. I love how you choose between silence and speaking the truth. This is how I know how much you mean what you say when you speak. I listen. I stop what I am doing to hear you out.

I love how you turn familiar images on their head.  I love how you reach for words and find metaphors I never could imagine. You are a poet. A magician. You do things with English that I will never be able to do because it is as familiar to me as my earliest memory; I can’t remember where it begins and ends. But you! You know that language cannot say everything there is to say. You speak suspended above saying and not saying and the impossible to say--and you still reach out to me from the place of great uncertainty.

And still you assume that I don’t like your words. You assume that your English is not correct. I know you assume this because you tell me. You say, “I know those aren’t the right words.” You say, “Please don’t judge me.”

How can I convince you that this is not true?

I know how much I love you can be hard to believe or understand. After all, I am someone who helps other people say what they are trying to say--in English. I am a writer who is only fluent in English. Who no matter how hard she has tried, despite living in Bulgaria for a year, never got past the toolset she needed to negotiate with taxi drivers. 

And when you ask me how to say something in “standard English”, I tell you. I help you NOT because your language is wrong. I do this because you said a remarkable and perfect thing. I do this because all language is translation from meaning into words that other people will understand. I am your translator, not your editor. I change your words only when you ask me to do so and only when changing them would help you be understood.

Please never speak “perfect” English. There is no “perfect English” because “English” does not exist.  There is only my English. And her English. And their English. And yours. You have created English in your mouth and hands just as all of us have done. English belongs as much to you as it does to me.

Language is alive. There can be no inferior living being. We only create language systems for connection, for expression, for understanding. Language belongs to the living and serves them alone. You are alive and so it is yours.

Please stop apologizing for your English. I am not horrified or upset by how you speak or how you write. I love them both. Because I love you. Have I mentioned that I love you?