My English will never be ‘perfect’ – and that’s what keeps a language alive | Nesrine Malik

As a child, I mixed English with Arabic. Now I know there’s no such thing as a fixed language that belongs to one special group

My first day in an English-speaking school was miserable. It was full of little humiliations: the kind that with the hindsight of adulthood seem trivial but in childhood plant the seed of a feeling of inadequacy that one can never expel.

My family had just moved to Kenya, where English was the official language. I was seven and could not speak a word of it, having grown up until that point in an Arabic-speaking country, and been educated at an Arabic school.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3dl5gKZ

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