I grew up speaking English with my family, and occasionally hearing my mom speak to her siblings on the phone in Romanian but never being taught it myself. A lot of the way I speak is influenced by my mom, so I asked her about her experience speaking English in the US as time passed. My mom learnt English through watching tv and by reading a lot of novels, and her language use has stayed pretty consistent to it. She did see that cursing casually became a larger thing that happened, but also said that she’s not sure if she noticed more because she was suddenly around a lot more kids and teens as me and my siblings grew up. She says that there are a lot more words always being made up and suddenly used everywhere like in the news that she has never heard, even though I pick them up easy and define them to her. Her accent is different than mine since she grew up speaking Romanian in a different country and I grew up with English in New York. There are words she says I pronounce wrong because I was taught a different pronunciation than her, and there are also words I know I say how she does that are not pronunciations other people use. She says I’m always making up more words when I use slang that younger people online use and it’s fun trying to explain them to her. The spelling system hasn’t changed that my mom’s noticed and she hasn’t had to change how she speaks over the years to add in any new words unless they are for new inventions or concepts (like uber or selfie).

the english word stampede is derived from the spanish word estampida. pronounced /stæm’pi:d/ in english, it’s original pronunciation is /ɛstam’pi:da/. english and spanish have different phonetic inventories and language rules. spanish does not start words with the /st/ sound in the onset, but will use /ɛst/ to keep the flow of the word. estampida ending with an a is because spanish is a gendered language and nouns will end with an o or an a. english does not have gendered nouns, so we did not keep the a ending sound. we kept the stressed syllable the same. spanish pronunciation has the long a sound that we rarely use and we use the æ that we are more comfortable pronouncing.