Anna Babel : Who counts as a speaker of a language?

Anna Babel·TEDxOhioStateUniversity

Who counts as a speaker of a language?

Summary 

This must be a really interesting story for Japanese who study English. It’s because Japanese people are always told that they can't speak English, even if they live in other countries where English is used. At home, they will use Japanese or when people see their faces, people believe that Japanese people can’t speak it. If they speak it well, they will be asked if they are Korean or Chinese. Sometimes, they write English really well because in school, they learn how to write it without speaking it for a long time and they read a lot of English books in Japanese. Many weird things happen. 

The speaker tells us that the relationship between language and social categories is intricate and complex but people are pattern seekers, we are always looking for ways to connect the dots between different types of information. We can’t understand that our underlying biases are projected onto language. People have different backgrounds so your assumptions are not always right and decisive. 

P.S. The speaker's example stories of how Spanish native speakers speak English were interesting as well and she whose name was babel used the story of the Babel tower first.