This article is submitted by Nick Shepherd, OBE, FRSA, MA, Language Editor.
The other month I was sitting at the back of a classroom in York, listening to six Russian women and a Turkish girl trying to get their tongues around the following:
“If we’d gone by train, it’d’ve been quicker.”
(Actually, to be completely truthful, the teacher was saying “If we’d’ve gone by train…”, which is a very common speech pattern in the UK today, but more of that another time).
They and the teacher struggled and struggled, but they were making very heavy weather of it, and I began to ask myself whether this was a useful exercise. Were they ever going to get it? Was there much point in their getting it? Was there any point in their getting it? The way they said it was perfectly clear, it just wasn’t very English. They started off saying:
“If we had gone by train, it would have been quicker.”
If I were able to say that in German or Italian, or whatever language I happened to be learning, I’d be a pretty happy bunny, but sadly those seven women ended up saying some kind of halfway house between the teacher’s swiftly spoken, compressed version, and their own original. I wasn’t sure that it was an improvement on where they had started.
Pronunciation touches very deep chords in the mind. Big implications lie behind weak forms, stress, intonation, rhythm, elision and so on: you can’t produce native-speaker-like forms unless you have surrendered in some way to the culture behind the language. You can get three quarters of the way there without much difficulty, so for an English person to say “Bonjour, comment ca va?” with French sounds but an English intonation and stress, is easy. To say it as one French person would say it to another implies a degree of commitment which few language learners – if they understood what they were committing themselves to – would be prepared to make. It touches you in your deep place, where your identity lies. To really sound like a French person you have to think like a French person; most of us are not willing to go that far, though a few of us are
.An easy way to demonstrate this is to note how few (post-puberty1) language learners achieve really native-like pronunciation. They can achieve everything else – good grammar, good vocabulary, good communication, excellent writing, even quite good idiomatic expressions -, but not the native sound of the language. Joseph Conrad and Arthur Koestler, two magnificent novelists in English, both had thick foreign accents all their lives (I know this because John Galsworthy, a fine English novelist, tells us about Conrad, and I have personally heard Koestler speak).
Oh, people will say they are willing, but once they begin to appreciate, if only subconsciously, the depth of commitment required, most will shy away from it. Some truly want to: a Spanish student once said to me, with passion: “I want to make the English language my own!” She did, too, and ended up sounding like a native speaker. In various parts of the world, including Latin America, you sometimes find students with a rather weak commitment to their own culture, which they see as being a pale imitation of somewhere else – Europe; the United States -; such students often turn to a foreign language with a hunger to make it, and the culture behind it, their own. But most people don’t.
Think about English people abroad. I can think of a young man in a small town in Catalonia who had truly “gone native”;I felt in him a rejection of things English, and a longing (which he was well on the way to achieving) to identify with Catalan ways. His wife is Catalan; he speaks to his children in Catalan; his mind is ‘moving over’ so to speak, to the new culture.
But most people living abroad don’t get within a mile of that, because deep down they don’t want to. They want to remain English – or Turkish, or French, or Peruvian, or Bangladeshi. They say they would like to learn the local language, but deep down they don’t. A few of them are honest enough to say so. George was a retired mailman from California whom I met in a bar in Veracruz, Mexico. He heard me address the barman in reasonable Spanish, and asked me how long I had been there. A year. “Well I been here seven years”, he told me with some contempt in his voice, “and I’m proud to say I don’t speak a word of this goddam language”.
.A redneck? An ignorant, prejudiced man? Yes, but deep down was he much different from the first secretary at the British Embassy who said to me with barely concealed distaste, “Gosh, you speak this language jolly well, don’t you”.
But to return to our students after this long digression: my view is that we should be helping them to speak in the way that is most comfortable to them. That will involve speaking with a foreign accent in most cases, and why not? Unlike Brian Sewell, I do not believe in unaccented English; everybody has an accent. The goal for our students, surely, must not be to sound like native speakers, but rather to communicate effectively on all the subjects they want to communicate about. If in that process they reveal that they are from Argentina, or Japan, or Scandinavia, that is as it should be, except for that tiny minority who really want to ‘make the move’ from one culture to another.
There is also the question of who the students will be communicating with. There was a time when the Anglo-Saxons believed that all anyone wanted to do was talk to them (us, I have to say). However, it is now clear that that assumption was just unthinking arrogance, and actually English is becoming, or has already become, a global lingua franca, which is more widely used to enable Argentinians to talk to Koreans, or Russians to talk to Malaysians, than it is to enable anybody to talk to the Anglo-Saxons. In fact this has been the case for many years: questionnaires to advanced students of English from as long ago as the seventies show that they are not primarily interested in English-speaking people and their ways, but rather in communicating globally on all the subjects that interest them: work, study, travel, interests and more. They wanted to talk to the whole world – but not particularly to the English!
What follows from this? The proponents of ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) are strongly and rightly aware of this, and have drawn a number of conclusions. They believe we should be teaching a lot less grammar, and taking a much less prescriptive approach to grammatical error where it does not impede communication. I am not sure about this, and think we should make every effort to help students get the grammar right. It’s not that difficult, and advanced students regularly do get the grammar right, in fact they are often more accurate in their use of grammar than the native speakers, who can be lazy and sloppy in their speech, or just plain ignorant.
But where I do think the ELF proponents have a strong point is in pronunciation. It’s a frustrating business, and most post-puberty learners never achieve native speaker levels of pronunciation. But why would they want to? There is no generally accepted agreement on pronunciation, as there is with grammar and vocabulary. There are thousands of speech variations, depending on where you live, how old you are, what schools you went to, what you do for a living, who you mix with, and more. In fact so much more that every single speaker has their own idiolect2. Think of a friend you haven’t seen for 10 years. The phone rings one day, you answer, and within about five seconds you know who it is. That would never happen with a piece of writing. The way you speak is utterly distinctive, indeed unique. Your accent tells a lot about you, and it should never be seen as something to be ashamed of. Mine will say that I come from the south London suburbs, with a few overlays from other places where I have lived, studied and worked; another’s will say Scotland; another’s will say Mumbai. Greater and greater exposure will cause greater and greater adjustment, so that if the woman from Mumbai stays in the UK for five years doing post-graduate studies, her accent will keep moving over. The reason? Her mind is moving over. But even then, there will always be a flavour of Mumbai in her speech, and I celebrate that.
What is wrong with being yourself? We don’t need cheap imitation native speakers, as Paul Davies used to say; what we need are students who are confident in their use of language, able to communicate effectively, and happy that their speech will reveal their origins. What could be better?
1A note on pre-puberty learning
It is often said that before puberty people are more flexible, less fixed in their speech patterns, and therefore better able to take on board fully the accent of another language. I think the truth lies deeper than that: the children have not yet committed themselves fully to the tribe they were born into, and are therefore still open to the speech patterns of other tribes. It’s partly about the tongue and the vocal chords, but mostly it’s about the mind.
2Idiolect
A language is a discrete collection of words and rules. Speakers of different languages cannot normally understand each other.
A dialect is a version of a language. This is usually distinguished by pronunciation, but also often containing word differences, and occasionally grammatical differences. Speakers of different dialects can normally understand each other, though there may be difficulties.
An idiolect is the way one individual uses language, usually distinguished by pronunciation, but there will be other distinguishing features too. Speakers of the same language can normally understand each other’s idiolects without difficulty.
About Nick Shepherd
Nick Shepherd is a highly experienced teacher of EFL, the language editor of Modern English Teacher, and author or co-author of about 20 books for students of EFL. He sends out a weekly tip for language teachers and learners, called grammar Bites. This is free, and can be obtained by sending an email to nick@jugglingwithenglish.co.uk, with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line.