Monday, July 13, 2009

Does this make sense?

I’ve recently been pondering the relationship between native speaker dialects, and accents displayed by second language speakers of the same language. We might ask why it is that we perceive one accent as simply a dialect, while another accent will lead us to assume that the owner is not a native speaker, but to me the more important question would be why a dialect is accepted by native speakers as just a non-standard variety while foreign sounding accents are often condemned as bad [insert language].


As any linguist would tell you, it’s not entirely obvious that there actually is a thing such as bad language. The goal of spoken language is communicating, which means that any oral communication that is not failing in conveying the intended meaning could not in any useful sense be labelled bad. Language, especially written, could be considered ugly, unpleasant, annoying, overly complicated and much more, but so long as the message is clear complaining about the form in most contexts seems pedantic and pointless.


It’s when language is illogical that real problems arise. Although the norms of any natural language are constantly evolving, some governing rules do exist or communication would be impossible. Children acquiring their first language are extremely attentive to such patterns, to the point where exceptions to a rule are ignored in early phases. In fact, irregular verbs and adjectives are generally treated by children in a certain phase of language acquisition as if they were regular. For example, a child might say I catched a butterfly and only later learn that the standard past tense form for catch is actually caught. Since this and other irregular conjugations are exceptions to a general rule, they cannot be learned as a chunk but are instead acquired one by one.


So what does this have to do with the topic? Well, it seems to me that while slightly different pronunciation or slightly expanded/altered vocabulary is accepted by all but the most conservative as simply a small variation of the standard, slightly different grammar will be frowned upon by many as bad language. Cases of non-standard grammar are often considered mistakes in communication. A child using the non-standard plural form deers is more likely to be corrected by its parents than one speaking with, for example, slightly more open vowels than the parents.


Pronunciation is the major difference between many dialects. Taking British and American English as examples, any native speaker of either of the dialects would instantly be able to tell the difference from pronunciation alone. Although the sound values of consonants may be essentially the same in both dialects, they are easily told apart by differences in prosody and the pronunciation of vowels and certain words. However, the same grammatical rules are shared by both British and American English. These are clearly two varieties of the same language.


Non-standard grammar seems to be considerably more difficult for native speakers to look past, and language containing such deviations is often thought of as sloppy or wrong. In my opinion, much of this view may stem from the instinctive feeling that non-standard grammar makes language illogical since deviations are mixed in with the normative rules, and/or that the vocabulary of one language is mixed with the grammatical rules of another.


Upon closer examination we may however find that the perceived illogicality is actually perfect logic based on rules unfamiliar to us. For example, a native speaker of English is likely to correct a second language speaker for saying I have hunger instead of the standard I am hungry, even though such a construction is the standard in many languages, such as French (avoir faim). If the speaker is French it is reasonable to assume that this construction is a direct translation of how she would express herself in her native tongue.


The point is of course that non-standard grammar is rarely just random mistakes but more likely has a pattern and logic of its own, and this pattern may have developed among native speakers or been brought in from a different language altogether. This goes to the core of the questions that I posed in the beginning of this post. If it is the case that non-standard use of a language does have governing rules in the same sense as the standard, then what exactly is the difference between a variety considered a dialect and one considered a foreign accent?


My answer is that the origin of an accent is often obvious to us through other means than careful analysis of grammar. We might for example know that no first language speaker regardless of dialect would use a certain construction, thus we can safely conclude that the speaker is not a native. Alternatively we might draw conclusions based on the appearance of the speaker, or our knowledge of the prosody of the speaker’s native language might betray her (some languages exhibit a bounded stress system, for example Finnish where the main stress is always on the first syllable of a word).


While we can obviously distinguish between a dialect and a foreign accent in most cases, there is no practical reason for doing so in everyday situations. In a time when different cultures, ethnicities and languages are widely exposed to each other, it makes no sense viewing a language spoken with a foreign accent as a flawed imitation of the language as it should be. It is more useful to accept a foreign accent as just another dialect, but coming in from a different angle.


Language is a continuum, and regardless of your native tongue you are the only one speaking exactly like you. It is an important lesson for all of us to learn that the idea of the one true variety of any language, from which every dialect ultimately stems, is nothing but a myth. This is the first step toward changing the question from Does this sound right? to Does this make sense?

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