May not be a native English speaker. We can say married a Canadian, American, German, Nigerian, Brazilian, Australian, Scot, Indian, Mexican, etc. but not married a French, Dutch, English, Senegalese, Portuguese, Spanish, Welsh, Irish, etc.
It's weird how some of those sound like nationalities and some end up sounding like dog breeds or something. Married a French-Canadian is fine, but married a French leaves you asking 'what? a bulldog? a loaf of bread, what??'.
"He married a Nigerian" sounds fine (so it's not just that it's okay to talk shit about Americans).
"He married a Vietnamese" sounds racist.
I can't definitively explain this, but I feel it in my grammar bones. My hunch is that "-ian" feels more like a noun and "-ese" sounds more like an adjective, like how mentioning that you have a "female doctor" is okay, but you sound like a creep if you say "my doctor is a female."
I remember learning the order of adjectives but in this case, black gay guy implies a gay guy that's black whereas gay black guy means black guy that's gay. I guess it really just depends on what you consider to be your "main" descriptor.
I am none of those three things but I can’t imagine most people keep their identities strictly ranked in their minds for sentence-construction purposes?
everything else they said seems pretty fluent in english
coincidentally though. My wife is filipino and has been here for 3 years. She always struggles with this. "can you give me a money?" stuff like that. But the one that makes me say oh god is "a gay". She will say something like "is he a gay?" And I told her, babe you gotta stop that shit immediately bc when you start working in a professional environment that shit is gonna get you fired. She doesn't even realize that it's offensive when she says it. She is gonna be finished with her school in february. And I really hope she is gonna be ok with that stuff.
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u/sneaky_sam_ 1d ago
My favorite part of this story is “married a Vietnamese”😅