Someone who speaks English with, shall we say, a certain noticeable style.
"I no liking America food. I cooking you good Korea food."
or
"I learn Burmese very good as a child but I Karen, not Burmese."
In other words, people who have learned English in order to communicate and have often done so without much formal education or training in the language. Or perhaps they did have English classes but the classes were inconsistent and perhaps poorly conducted.
Such people often serve as translators in their places of work and when interacting with American society Despite the English grammar such people are often clearly of high intelligence, serve as leaders of their community, and, despite, the grammar problems, have learned to communicate when many other members of their community have not. So what's going on here?
Basically, bad habits. Bad, very ingrained habits. And sometimes a lack of understanding as to what correct grammar should be. In teaching of English as a second language there is a term for this. It is called "fossilization."
As most know, a "fossil" is when natures takes something, perhaps a piece of bone, shell, or plant, and converts it to stone. In geology and other sciences "to fossilize" means "to change something into stone and make it a fossil."
In language teaching "fossililzation" refers to the process where a grammatical structure, a way of speaking, is not only routinely formed incorrectly but is done so regularly and routinely and automatically by the speaker. This is something English teachers see regularly. It's a difficult process to fix, but there are ways to work on it.
Of course, this happens not just in English learning but in the learning of other languages too. Perhaps one reason the subject interests me is because I have a problem with fossilized structures in my Mandarin Chinese.
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