Hello everyone!
Today we would like to talk about the topic
“English kills the other languages”.
The truth is that we have for some time now began
to replace some of our Portuguese words with English ones and we are not aware
that it is happening. English is becoming more and more present in our lives.
Kids learn English in school at the same time that they learn their own
language - Portuguese, and they grow up with the Internet and social networks
where the main language is English. The same thing happens with movies, series,
music and games. Everything comes from English-speaking countries and we have
to deal with it, being forced to learn their language.
An area where this happens a lot is in Technology.
Most of the expressions that we learn (in this area) are in English. Software,
Hardware, CDs, etc. are some examples of words that we don’t have in
Portuguese, so we use the English ones.
But there are some concepts for which we have the
Portuguese word and we prefer to use the English ones. So, in our opinion, we
are killing our language when we do that.
Some examples are:
- Dia das bruxas (Portuguese)/ Halloween (English)
- Rosquinha (Portuguese)/ Doughnuts (English)
- Correio Eletronico (Portuguese)/ Email (English)
- Entrada (Portuguese)/ Hall (English)
- Conjunto (Portuguese)/ Kit (English)
And why do we do that?
We asked some people this question and
the reactions we got were mostly the same. Firstly, they didn’t know why they
do that, because they never really thought about it. Then they said that they
use the English words instead of the Portuguese ones because it’s easier and
everyone does that too.
To sum up, maybe English is really
killing our language or maybe we are the ones that are doing that, without a specific
reason.
