NSEspeaker: My car needs washed. SE speaker: What? I do not understand you. There was a posting recently exactly with this syntax. The people who commented never said that the NSE line would not be understood, only that it was characteristic

I agree with Forbes. It seems to me that the problem is not so much Standard English, which is, or should be, a democratic, common denominator for second language speakers (not to mention for native speakers who also speak other varieties of

C'mon, Forbes, tell it as it is. Right. I will. I said: "All native English speakers really ought to be able to speak to each other without too much difficulty." What I meant was that most native speakers of English are

Again we seem to be looking at multiple Standard Englishes - dialects of a dialect/sociolect, so to speak. It is the classic problem of how far you go in classification. If one is comparing the styles of two different writers, or perhaps

< but your text says that only one example is enough to show that something is "quite common ". > << Again we seem to be looking at multiple Standard Englishes - dialects of a dialect/sociolect, so to speak. >>

After a bit of Googling, it seems like the origin is one of two Pidgin English dialects: Chinese/English and Native American/English. It sounds credible to me. Many Chinese workers immigrated to the US in the mid 1800's to work on the first

Apparently, "at about" was standard English enough for H.L. Mencken to use it in a letter to James Joyce. Yet, it wasn't standard for Shaw (1970. See below.). Again we seem to be looking at multiple Standard Englishes - dialects of a

Dear all, I requested from my tenant 14% increment for the rent of my appartment (according to the Cyprus law). He refused and I suggested to suffering 4% as to reduce the increment from 14% to 10%. Then, he accepted my suggestion and I

So is Standard English also a dialect, then? (English is "A language so widely distributed naturally has many varieties. These are known as dialects . 1 That word doesn’t apply just to rural or uneducated forms of speech;

Prescriptivists today are sailing against the gales of mediocrity, adrift in the vast oceans of literary ignorance, besieged by the vicious onslaughts of rap, dialect, and urbandictionary. "(... )is just the same junk everyone says on