Over the past 10 plus years there has been a shift in the way Egyptians speak. I spoke to my parents about this and they told me that the way they speak now compared to how they used to speak as kids has changed significantly. The biggest difference that they noticed was the strong influence other languages have on our dialect. More specifically English. Instead of using the Arabic name of some objects a lot of Egyptians will call the item by its english name with the Arabic pronunciation. So it sounds very close to Arabic, however the word itself is in English. This is common especially in cities that have many tourists. Another significant change that my parents mentioned was that we like to call certain items by their brand names rather than their actual names. For example, we call any soda “Pepsi” or with their accent “Bepsi”, even if the soda is a different brand. This is very interesting because as a bilingual speaker, I don’t notice sometimes how common it is for Egyptians to use English words in their dialect.

I spoke with my mom and she said that one of the biggest changes in the language was the amount of abbreviations we have for words and phrases. i think this would be considered as slang but terms like LOL and BRB and things like that weren’t as common. with more people having smartphones they started using more abbreviations to type quicker. going off of the abbreviations we also noticed that there are some words that are just being shortened for example the term rizz is short for the noun charisma meaning to charm someone. I also spoke to a professor and she said that now we recycle words to have different meanings for example the word ate is defined as the past action of eating but when used in the context of a compliment, it takes on a different meaning. these changes are just in the english language but i speak Russian also so one thing that me and my mom noted was that there was a change in the way people are being named for example when my mother was a kid, they used to put the fathers name as the middle name but now the middle name isn’t used anymore. you can tell a kid has American parents if they have a middle name in those slavic countries.

I decided to speak to my mom about how the English language, specifically New York language and terminology. She told me our accents are definitely different and more distinctive nowadays. She told me now its like someone can tell you are from New York just based off how we sound when we speak to other people. She also told me that back in her day, people were more respectful based off how they speak to other people who are older than them. She said people said maam and sir much more often. She also said maybe the biggest difference between English in New York from nowadays compared to back in the day is the slang in our words. Words we say that just did not exist back in that time, that are just plain normal to us now. We say “word” so much now. Agreeing with someone, trying to sound bigger than someone, trying to explain something to someone or even trying to prove a point, we say “word” for all of that. I don’t want to put profanity in this but I feel like i must because she told me no one said this word back in her day. The word “deadass” is just such a normal word, not even just in New York, but in a lot of places in America. People say that word all of the time, again to describe many things. Just like “word” you can use that word to agree with someone, to explain something, to exclamate something, or even trying to explain a point. There are many other differences, but these differences are specifically what my mom told me for this assignment.

My mom says that nothing has changed with the spelling system. The accent has changed, and our family members born in Latin American countries came here and did have a stronger accent. Opposed to my mother born in The United States having no accent. The one thing she has noticed and the language she speaks is Spanish. Many people do try to learn to speak and understand Spanish as many people do come from other Latin American countries that speak Spanish. People who come from Central America and South America do have different dialects with words that sound the same or have multiple meanings. For example, for someone who has a cold my mom would say she has a “cataro”. But in Colombia or other parts of Latin America, they would say “gripe”. There is a proper way of speaking Spanish. In every language there are many dialects, but we all try to understand one another when we are spoken to in that language.  If you’re having a conversation with someone, you’re unfamiliar with you use the formal version of Spanish. For example, ” usted” would be the formal way of saying you, and the informal way would be “tu”. When we have conversations with our family members we use the informal way. My mom says that since I’m learning to speak Spanish there is no accent and is Americanized. My mom was glad to be able to learn to speak Spanish because it allowed her to have better careers in knowing another language.

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 .

I decided to speak to my grandfather about English language because we speak English differently from accent to the way we pronounce word. He grew up in Guyana and so did my mom and I but he moved to the United States after he retired. I grew up in Guyana from birth until I was 17 when I moved from Guyana to United States. When I was younger, he would pronounce words so differently that I could not understand him. This happened because English in Guyana has changed over the years from the time my grandfather was born. When we were in public, he would speak in a more formal English because we lived in a country which was formerly ruled by Britian but once we arrived home or around family members, you would here his Guyanese accent and words. Some words he used were “ayo” which means people like “why ayo don’t go there” and “am” which can be used to replace “it” like “wuh you name am”. Many of those words are not used regularly anymore, you mostly hear them from older folks.  How they spell words is different, like color, spelt like “colour” or neighbor spelt like “neighbour”. I first realized this when I moved to the United States and the teacher corrected me during an English class. My teacher marked me wrong for misspelling words by putting “u” and “s” in some words. I also learned about the different ways Guyanese speak, like how people in the capital speak slower compared to people in the country areas.

For this assignment, I’m going to choose my mom. She was born in Palestine and came to America when she was 19. She has to learn from my dad because he was born in Palestine as well but came to America when he was much younger so he learned English faster. With that being said my mom learned English from my dad. My mom had trouble learning English though. It was a tough challenge, especially coming to a new country with a whole new language/customs. She is fluent in English but you can tell she was born in another country due to the accent. However, there are times when she does ask me about a word she might not know, so either I or my other siblings would have to explain it to her. Even when she reads something, my siblings and I would have to explain the word that way. When it came to me, it was kind of the opposite. I had trouble learning Arabic. Usually, younger kids learn their foreign language when they’re toddlers that was me for instance. My mom would speak in Arabic while my dad would speak in English. However, as I got older I went into a public school with other American kids. This lead me losing my memory of Arabic words/learn how to say it. Even the pronunciation is due to over the years not speaking it for a while. That’s why when I speak to other Arabic speakers sometimes they may get confused when I say a certain word, (or might be due to my different dialect from them). But usually when I visit back home it’s easier for me to pick up my Arabic because I’m surrounded by my Arabic speakers.

I chose to talk with my mom for this assignment. My mom came to the United States from Mexico when she was 14 years old. She was sent to school, right then and there. She didn’t know any English and the students would pick on her. But she had mentors and friends help her, which she was glad about. Although she practiced and practiced, she says her English still isn’t perfect, there’s times where she struggles but asks me for help or if there is a word she overhears she asks me what it means and how would you use it in a sentence. For me, I learned Spanish at a very early age until I started going to school at age 4, is when I started talking more English and getting mixed up with both. Right now I would say yes I definitely have an accent when speaking Spanish, I know what I want to communicate with other Spanish speakers but it comes out not the way I want it and sometimes they don’t understand. Right now I speak both English and Spanish, well actually Spanglish. It’s easier for me to understand and something I have been doing since I was a little girl learning both languages.

I talked to my parents about the way that they spoke when they were growing up. My dad lived on Staten Island all his life, and my mom is from Queens. My dad said that he has met people who “talked funny” – meaning they had strong ‘New York’ accents. My mom lived in Queens with my Grandmother who is originally from Slovenia and has a very strong accent. From birth, my mom slightly gained a part of that accent but she said it quickly faded out as she knew more words. In her childhood, my grandmother would often mix English words with German words and that helped my mom learn a little bit of that language; she says that in some aspects, the two languages are too different on the surface.

They often say that my “accent” is different from theirs because of the way I talk – as well as other people my age talk. I think they notice a difference because of the slang I use from time to time and the certain way I talk. The way that slang words are used is very interesting; I don’t quite remember, but my mom got out some old letters she used to write to her friends and certain slang was recognizable but seemed to have slightly different meanings. 

Lastly, I asked them if any spelling of words had changed over the years, and they said they hadn’t noticed anything.

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).