For this blog post , I chose to speak with my mum because she is the perfect example of the major differences although we speak the same language. So, our first language is Arabic and we lived most of our lives in Egypt but the difference in our English accent was obviously realized when I went to British schools and the teachers over there were foreigners , however my mother didn’t have this opportunity back there when she was younger . I would always realize how some words she is eager to learn but just fails to pronounce it in the correct way we do . Nevertheless, even though we both speak Arabic I always find my parents or actually even every older person , familiar with words I’ve never heard and even their childhood songs are just very different from what we hear nowadays . They don’t know the songs we hear and we never heard the ones they know . When it comes to writing , is where I think there’s a little change but not that much. Nothing changed in writing much but the fact that their Arabic writing looks so professional than ours makes sense when we are more fluent in English because each one of us is professional in the language he grew up exposed to the most . I would always ask her to check my spelling for Arabic words and she would always ask me for spelling and definitions of words she wants to say in English . I wouldn’t say our Arabic accents are different because I grew up in Cairo as well as my mum but there would be other accents for Egyptians growing up in other states , for example in Aswan people kind of have an different Egyptian accent than the ones we speak, still the same language and words just different pronunciation .

One of the words I would like to consider is “café” which was borrowed from french to English. Pronounced /ˈkæˌfeɪ/ in English, whereas in French, it’s pronounced /kafe/. The pronunciation was adapted to fit the phonemic inventory and phonotactics of English.In French the word café usually doesn’t have elongation of the /e/sound at the end however in English there’s elongation at the end of the word where it is pronounced as the diphthong /eɪ/. The vowel /a/ In the beginning of the word is also pronounced differently in English than French, the pronunciation is /a/ rather than the open vowel /a/ . However, the English phonotactic has stuck with the constant-vowel-constant- vowel rule (CVCV) which makes it easier for English speakers to adapt to using the word as well as the constant cluster /f/ followed by /eI/. Both constants In English and French are pronounced similarly and the word overall has been adapted to fit in the English phonotactic retaining its form and meaning from French (donor language ).

Back during  middle school we used to take English courses and practice a lot . So one time we were writing an essay and I said “me and my friends decided to go out “ so my teacher pointed it out for me hat the correct way is to say my friends and I , and truly I didn’t forget it since that day although it didn’t sound convincing to me and felt so weird , but every time I hear someone saying it , it takes me back to the old days. I also remember that my tutor used to tell me that we shouldn’t use too much contractions because I was literally using them in every word and the word “goin out “was a staple in my writing .Even though I know that it’s not grammatically correct and doesn’t count as proper English but I use it while I’m talking a lot of the times.This made me realize how important English is and that we need to consider the proper word structure and sentences.