"My relationship with English began by force. Growing up in A Coruña, Spain, in the early 2000s, we were told that learning a second language was just as important as memorizing the multiplication table. After the 2008 financial crisis left the Spanish economy " melting down like a Dali horrorscape," as one Atlantic writer put it, English became what seemed like our national salvation, a one-way ticket to a better future abroad."
"Nobody in my household spoke the language, but American pop culture was my gospel; every song on my iPod Nano brought me closer to the leafy promised land of Elk River, Minnesota, and the crisscrossing highways that stitch together the United States. Glee 's image of America lured me-a city boy living in the Galicia region-into believing that I could also belong within those suburban high-school walls. All I had to do was learn some new words."
"Only when I moved to Lawrenceville, Georgia, as a foreign-exchange student in 2011, did I realize how naive I had been: Despite its shiny basketball court, Peachtree Ridge High School was a far cry from Glee, and my British English phrases often left me lost in translation. (I still remember my classmates' faces when I misplaced my eraser and asked them if they had seen my "rubber.")"
Learning English was mandated in early-2000s A Coruña, Spain, and became a perceived national salvation after the 2008 financial crisis, promising better futures abroad. American pop culture guided aspiration, with music and television cultivating an imagined suburban American life. A 2011 foreign-exchange placement in Lawrenceville, Georgia, revealed cultural mismatches: British English phrases taught in Spain caused misunderstandings and an accent marked the narrator as foreign. English exists as multiple national variants and fragmented second-language forms, while slang shifts by generation and locale, making lexical choices insufficient to erase markers of origin.
Read at The Atlantic
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