Prejudices Against People Who Speak English as a Second Language

Several years ago, we submitted a trailer of our film to a well-known Asian American Film funder, whose name I will not mention here. And our grant application was rejected and I requested a reviews by the judges. One of them said that it was clear that Mr. Truong, Can's father, did not speak English as his first language and that I should have gotten him a translator. This statement was rather offensive to me and made me wonder how an Asian American organization could have allowed that judge to be critiquing films. Firstly, the fact that a language is not a person's first does not necessarily mean that he/she cannot be fluent or speak the language proficiently. Many Asian Americans speak one or more languages well without an accent; many people around the world are multi-lingual. In fact, in some countries around the world, it is natural to learn several languages. In Holland, most speak English, in addition to Dutch. In several African countries, there are over 200 languages, many of them are indigenous and are spoken by a small percentage of the population. Such insensitivities should not be perpetrated by an Asian American organization. They should know better having lived at the confluence of more than one linguistic world.

English isn't my first language, but I speak it better than most. This is one of the ways in the majority of Americans, many of whom are monolingual take barbs at Asian Americans who speak a multitude of languages. Furthermore, an accent is not indicative of ignorance or an inability to speak the language. I must preface this statement with the disclaimer that individuals have variable levels of linguistic ability and highly different ways of expressing themselves. Some people can learn to speak many languages proficiently, just like some people can learn to excel at playing several instruments or play a variety of different sports.