maybe it's silly when my dialect of english isn't minoritised or endangered but it makes me sad when i realise that the way i speak has become americanised and i've lost a lot of the phrases i grew up with in favour of ones i've picked up online. the other day i found myself saying I would "throw [something] out". it would always have been "throw away" in my family. when did i start saying out instead? "i need to throw that out" = I need to throw it away, in the way i learned to speak. talking about laundry and groceries instead of doing the washing, doing the food shop. "i need to do laundry" where my mum would say "i've got to put a wash on". these are the everyday things, but there are a thousand more tiny details, language flattened and homogenised by media and international conversations
and it's not that the international conversations aren't valuable. and my dialect is not anything special or anything endangered. but language variety and dialect variety matters even when it's boring and everyday, i think. i am trying to remember how to speak with my own tongue again
