Victoria
I witnessed a rather interesting interaction downtown the other day that sparked some thought for me, so I thought I would share it here. I’d like to preface this by saying that I did a whole lot of inferring during this brief observation, so please take my reading of the atmosphere with a grain of salt.
While grabbing lunch at an A&W, I was expertly served by a lovely lady with a strong Mediterranean accent (maybe Greek? I wasn’t entirely sure) in excellent English, her demeanour polite and friendly. While I was waiting for my order to be finished, a customer with a Chinese accent approached the woman to ask for a drink. The customer appeared to still be in the fledgling stages of English-learning, pointing at the drink machine to try to make her choice clear to the server. However, in that moment, the server’s entire attitude changed. Rather than smiley and outgoing as she had been with me, she rolled her eyes at the Chinese woman, pointing at the machine as she tried to figure out what the woman wanted, asking “this one? This one?” loudly enough to draw other customers’ and workers’ attention. After the woman and her children left the restaurant, the server turned to complain about the woman to her coworkers, lamenting about how she had slowed down the lunch rush with her difficulty communicating.
Continue reading “Burgers and bootlicking bilingualism”