Alex Wollor speaks English. It is the language he used at home, in school and on the streets in his native Liberia.
So when the teenager fled the civil war there, eventually settling with his mother and sisters in Fairfax County five years ago, he expected the shared language to ease his transition. But he found that classmates often gave him blank looks, unable to understand what he said. Teachers found fault with his written work.
"I thought it was going to be the same, but when I came here, it wasn't," Wollor, 16, said. "You know how people speak slangs? In Africa, people have different slangs. If I was talking fast, you wouldn't understand me." [...]
| Finishing Andrea Levy's "Small Island" last week means I enjoyed Maria Glod's registration-required Washington Post article "Connecting With the American Dialect" all the more.
posted in articles on May 9, 2005 2:15 PM | t (0)
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