phonology

The Dangers of Being Anglophone

/ The Women of Letters / 2 Comments

I have been an ESL teacher and tutor/editor/consultant to internationals for many years, and I always come away with a sense of gratitude for being a native speaker as I see students struggle with grammatical irregularities, odd pronunciations, bizarre idioms, and the myriad English accents. But my ESL/EFL students teach me as much as I teach them, not only about my own language but also about the dominant nature of English. While I do think it fortunate to be a native English speaker, I have also learned about the dangers of this, especially through my involvement in the polyglot community that really began deeply in the past year.

“Everybody in the world speaks English.” This is a mentality that many native Anglophones have, and it is all too easy to rely on this when we go abroad. With a couple rare exceptions, when I travel, I always make it a point to first ask, “Do you speak English?” as a courtesy to the other person, even when I am 99% sure that they do. I think this helps take the stigma away from English speakers being unwilling to learn other languages. Probably the most humbling experience of my life was the three weeks I spent in Salzburg, Austria at the Mozarteum Conservatory. Armed with two years of German study (plus the ability to speak other European languages), I figured I would do quite well. However, Austrian German is a different dialect from Hochdeutsch, there were very few Americans or native Anglophones, and even some of the internationals had opted to study German rather than English. Few people at the Conservatory spoke English. Master classes were largely conducted in German, but if the teacher could do so, s/he would speak English with those of us who were native speakers. It truly gave me an eye, even as a polyglot, into what it feels like to be a linguistic minority. Never had I been so relieved as when I landed in Finland to visit friends in Tampere who speak like natives, talk to a population that excels in English, and where there are tons of American TV shows that are not dubbed.

We have very particular sounds that are difficult to pronounce. These include the different ’th’ sounds, the English ‘a’ (as in cat), the frontal l, the z, and especially the peculiar English letter r. These subtleties are often things that non-native speakers cannot hear, or even produce. We have consonant clusters that are nearly impossible for some people to pronounce, given the insertion of vowels between them in their languages. Of course, there are sound that are very difficult for English speakers to pronounce in other languages, such as the Czech rz (written as an r with the diacritical mark over it), Italian rr, aspirated Korean consonants, or the Tamil ‘zh’ that many native speakers cannot even pronounce. The richness of sounds in our language is part of what makes it very difficult for those who learn English.

Another important aspect of our language that we must be aware of is its constant reinvention, especially in American English and with the advent of personal technology devices. We are a very scientifically advanced country, and therefore we are adding new words to our vocabulary. Texting has spawned a whole new genre of language, which one could argue often dumbs our language down. We are also a very young country, and so our vocabulary develops along with our social change. This may not be the case in other countries and cultures where their languages are ancient, and they may not have certain words for certain items or concepts. Bhutan is one example, as they only opened to the world a couple decades ago. They have to borrow words for science and technology. Therefore, we are in a sense forcing the rest of the world to use our form of communication. This adds to the hegemonic aspect of English.

English, especially American English, favors efficiency. Therefore, in our interactions, we can be very direct and fast. This may not go over with many other cultures, especially when doing business or diplomacy. It is imperative for people who work in these fields to understand the cultural context in which they are working and communicating.

These are just but a few points about which we must be mindful when speaking with non-native English speakers, especially when overseas. Even making the effort to learn a few words shows a willingness and humility to understand that the world is full of linguistic diversity. A Stanford professor who taught an undergraduate course on how to teach ESL suggested that everyone should spend one week per year learning the basics of a new language. That is truly an excellent suggestion–plus a lot of fun!

The Physicality of Language

/ The Women of Letters / Leave a comment

There is an emphasis–dare I say overemphasis?–on the intellectual, cerebral, and cognitive aspects of language today, especially in academia. Camille Paglia has written countless essays on the dominance of postmodern deconstructionism, how we are in a Foucauldian and Derridean era, so to speak. We are unfortunately in a paradigm of a very heady way of approaching ideas and language, and it is important to think beyond this. What of other aspects of language? We have explored the importance of rhyme in my post “Time for Rhyme” on this blog which also appeared in the Macedonian online magazine Blesok. But it is important to go further than rhyme and to think about how language can be physical, auditory, something that invokes movement.

French stage actor and pedagogue Jacques Lecoq did quite a lot with physical movement and mime in his teaching. I was fortunate enough to have the rare opportunity to watch a video of one of his classes, given to me by someone who had studied at his school (from what I understand students are discouraged from revealing too much on video about it). There was one exercise where students from different countries were asked to make a hand gesture related to a certain word. It was interesting to see the diversity of responses as to how language is physicalized, and how different cultures perceive the same words.

The Italian language is so enjoyable because it is so kinesthetic. I’m not only referring to the stereotypical hand gestures that most people imagine when they think of an Italian talking, but also the way in which the inflections and the double consonants and the way vowels are drawn out for emphasis resulting in a very rollicking, physical way of speaking. There is a reason why opera was born in Italy: opera requires the physicalization of language in one’s body. There are a number of physical gestures in Italian that express a certain emotion or thought. It is also important to mention that from region to region, the language varies greatly. Italy is a country full of not only mutually unintelligible accents but dialects. The singsong calls of the Neapolitan vendors at the market (in dialect, or with a Neapolitan accent) are not something that would ever be heard in, for example, Milan, nor would they easily be understood by people of different regions, if even understood at all. This gives a richness to the linguistic culture of “the boot” (as some people lovingly refer to Italy, due to its shape), which is unified through a “standard Italian” accent even though many people still speak dialects at home or within their communities.

I am bilingual in both English (my dominant language by far) and Tamil. The latter is a Dravidian language, completely unrelated to the Indo-European family. Tamil speakers, in my observation, do not always use their hands when they talk, though there are some common gestures and it is certainly a more gesture-heavy language than English. What is noteworthy is that Tamil has quite a lot of onomatopoeia in it. To me, this is a different sense of physicality in language: the actions and motions and sounds of things as well as objects themselves are represented well by the language. For example, the word for firecracker, “pattoss,” is an actual noun that is onomatopoeic. Of course, there is always the much-mocked head nod on the Subcontinent (which I do find hysterically funny). A cousin once told a story of a four head-nod conversation at a train station between him and a vendor on the platform in which both parties completely understood what the other was saying!

We cannot ignore the tonal languages in which meaning is conveyed by tones. This is a very simplistic way of describing the complexity of how pitching one’s voice, the inflections used, and the subtleties of sounds are equally as important to a language as its orthographic and cognitive features. We think of, immediately, Chinese, and there are numerous others such as Thai or Vietnamese and even Swedish. And to go beyond tones, there are families of languages with clicks, such as the Khoisan languages of southern Africa. The language of Xhosa, which is a Bantu language spoken in South Africa, features a high degree of click consonants that can be quite challenging to non-natives. Comedian Russell Peters even has a routine about this that many readers might find funny.

In our digital era where everything is two-dimensional and on a screen, highly physicalized languages are a welcome relief. English is a rich and complex language, but American English in particular can be so literal, efficient, and to-the-point that we need to think about different ways of expressing ourselves, both verbal and nonverbal. Americans need to know more about different types of languages around the world, because when you understand a language, you get to know the people who speak it.