Sitting in the bus, listening to the lively conversation of several people speaking in Vietnamese; if I close my eyes I can imagine myself in another country. Their particular intonation differs from all other languages, but I occasionally discern “Judah”, “Goodbye”, etc. seamlessly mixed into their flow of communication.
The Cantonese that I spoke when I was a child was also mixed with many English words. They were incorporated into the sentence structure and became a part of the every day language to a point that I didn’t even think of them as English. After an absence of nearly twenty years, I went back to Hong Kong to find that the Cantonese I knew had evolved. People recognized as soon as I opened my mouth that I didn’t belong there.
