My Chennai: Our Students

Our students are the children of multinational corporate employees with the most kids coming from South Korea. There are also a fair number of French and Americans in the school. Also a handful of families from Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, the UK, Australia, Mexico, and Germany. It's a great mix. So, parents from those non-English-speaking places are sending their kids to the American International School with little or no English to get an education and to learn English. We're working with well-off, well-educated, and well-behaved kids. It's nice.

In Chennai, the working class people speak Tamil, and when they speak English, it's very difficult to understand them. They speak really fast with the stress and intonation in all the wrong places. Yet they think they're speaking normal English, so it gets a little tricky.

Middle class Indians, for the most part, speak a beautiful Queen's English with a soft lilting accent and are very easy to understand. Many of the Indian schools and universities use English as the medium of instruction, but then there are many people who don't attend those schools. So the language on the street is Tamil, and I'm not sure if there is an English language school industry like there is in so many other places. In reading back over this, I realize how elitist I sound, referring to the non-standard English as "wrong." They are wonderful, generous people; it's just that we can hardly understand them.

John, our son, just said, unprompted, as he pulled out his Spanish homework, and this is a first: