How well would you consider yourself to speak Spanish: &quot;very well&quot;, &quot;well&quot;, &quot;not well&quot; or &quot;not at all&quot;?  Your English writing is perfect, and I assume you speak English just as well.<p>&gt;  Same with bad grammar sounding less intelligent, it&#x27;s not actually any less intelligent as long as it still communicates the message.<p>Where do you draw the line, though?  For example, using &quot;bad&quot; instead of &quot;poor&quot; seems acceptable and not an indication of low linguistic competence.<p>However, consider the sentence &quot;dum talk no mean u dum&quot;.  It communicates the message, but would you consider someone who said that to be as intelligence as someone phrased it &quot;Same with bad grammar sounding less intelligent, it&#x27;s not actually any less intelligent as long as it still communicates the message&quot;?  I wouldn&#x27;t.<p>There is a line between being a snob and being someone who expects something above bare-minimum competence.  I can understand the meaning of phrases like &quot;dum talk no make u dum&quot;, but I find such speech unacceptable.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s funny when Americans claim that British people just &#x27;sound smarter&#x27; when British people are just that: British.<p>That situation is indeed funny, but I think it&#x27;s beneficial overall.  Having a prestige dialect discourages the development of parochial dialects, and helps unify speakers of the language across different regions.<p>It&#x27;s the same within the United States.  My parents are both monolingual English speakers, but have heavy regional accents.  My wife and I both have standard American (&quot;CNN English&quot;) accents, and occasionally make fun of their accents between the two of us.  As American English is to British English, so is regional English to standard American English.<p>We recently moved to another region of the country.  Noone here speaks our parents&#x27; regional accent, and most of the locals also speak our standard American accent.  I think we&#x27;ve met new friends easier than if we both had our parent&#x27;s strong regional accent.