I promise I’m more intelligent than you might think right now. My friend had to explain what she meant and when I finally got it I belted out “OH…you mean a LINE,” to which she responded to me with an awkward look. I had to tell her that the term “queue” is used in Great Britain, but that we use the word “line” in the States. As I talked with the Swedes a bit more, it became apparent that they had learned a completely different form of English. Most of the time we could easily understand each other, and for both of us, the English that we used because a sense of pride. The Swedes were eager to compare words with my English, just as I was eager to here more about what they had been taught. This occasional word struggle and eagerness to teach and learn new vocabulary was a type of linguistic diversity – and it was fun.

I completely agree that it’s more important to take pride in our own dialects than to attempt to achieve a linguistic “purification” of sorts. Let’s enjoy our individuality, even as it relates to our speech (an argument that I think can be brought up in the bilingual education debate to support its preservation, but that’s a topic for another blog…).