"Mate! That's well bad mate!" "Yeah mate! That's well wicked!"Did you understand the introductory dialogue? Probably not. Roughly 'translated', it means:
"Friend! That's really cool, friend!" "Friend! That's really awesome!"
Yes, it's surprising how limitless the English language can be. The above dialogue, written in English, can barely be understood by the majority of English-speaking populations. Only about four percent of the whole of England would be able to understand- the teenagers. As shown, for most teenagers, the word 'bad' isn't used in its original meaning- in fact, it means the opposite: positive, cool. English has been extended and warped to the point that probably less than seventy five percent of its speakers can recognize the same language that is spoken in the same country, a different neighborhood, or halfway across the world.
As a teenager who has lived in completely different parts of the world, in both non-English and English-speaking communities, the flexibility yet constancy of the language still baffles me. My speech, since moving to an American English community in South Korea, has completely changed from when I used to live in England. In England, I used to speak using the phrases from the above dialogue, probably sounding perfectly normal to any teenager living in the southern part of England, but cryptic to the rest of the world. Now, when I talk to my American-English speaking friends, I use slang such as 'mad' instead of 'well' to mean 'very'.
However, what surprises even more is the fact that different people from different demographics can still communicate using the same language, despite the clear differences in diction and syntax. I'm living proof of this- before I moved to an international school in Korea, the only English-speaking part of the world I'd ever lived in was South England, whose English is completely different from that of Korean Americans. But, I managed to communicate with my peers, with only a few misunderstandings on the way.
I think that the English language is great, because it can be used in so many different forms to communicate the same meaning, which is why I'd like to use it in my career to convey information in a variety of different styles.
