It was a sunny afternoon, and I had decided to go walking with my grandfather to a nearby park as I and my grandfather had nothing else to do. When we reached there, we noticed that the park was less crowded than normal, and so we were easily able to find a bench that was under the shade of a tree. This bench was next to two other benches, one on either side, and on one of the benches, sat a few teenagers, and on another, sat two elderly figures- a man and a woman. After we sat down, I noticed that the teenagers were speaking using colloquial English and not “standard”/ white English.  The teenagers were all boys and one of the boys said, “Yo, lemme be the captain of the next game” and another boy immediately responded by saying, “Nah bruh, you’re bad at choosing people.” From these quotes, it’s implied that although people may speak in full sentences most of the time, they may not use “standardized” or school taught English to communicate. These quotes also indicate that people may tend to use slang most of the time to convey messages as seen with the words “Yo,” “lemme,” and “bruh.” This might be because using slang is just more efficient than speaking using school taught English. For example, saying “let me” instead of “lemme” would take more time and thus slang, in this case, can be used to speak faster. Moreover, I also noticed that the elderly were talking about the COVID pandemic and they were wondering when it would end. One member of the couple was talking using “broken” English and the other member, from what I could listen to, was talking using school taught English/ “standardized” English. The elderly man, who used “broken” English, sounded to me like he didn’t speak in complete sentences. Their conversation sounded like this, with the man stating, “Corona bad, kill many people, when end?” and the woman replying, “Yes, the Corona virus certainly destroyed a lot of lives. I just hope it ends soon.” From the man’s part of the conversation, it’s exemplified how people don’t need to speak in full sentences all the time, and it’s also displayed from their conversation as a whole that people speaking differing variations of English can still comprehend each other. I also noticed that in the former group, the boy that said “Nah bruh” also used body language (shaking his head) to enhance his idea of disapproval and in the latter group, the elderly woman also nodded her head to show to the elderly man that she agreed with what he said. Conclusively, one main idea can be received from all these details- that the language English isn’t as strict as it used to be and it’s so flexible that it allows different people to communicate in unique ways.

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