Who the blood clot wrote this?

Going off on a tangent to the previous entry I would like to briefly discuss my experience as a second language learner of English, and specifically one of the problems that I have dealt with in becoming a fluent speaker, namely accent.

This entry was actually triggered by a Youtube comment that caught my eye earlier this week. Browsing through random dancehall songs and videos I stumbled upon a comment posted by a user apparently annoyed with the Patois style of writing used by many other authors in the comment section:

so many scrots on here talk gibberish wanna be yardy probably from uk usa or germany . i have listened and love reggae 20 years know every artist but talk english as i am English and white . people should understand you can like something without being a total prick mi dun bullet sei ! and yes i have just kissed my rass clot bumba pussy clot blood clot teeth get my point

This comment is intriguing on several levels. The main point seems to be that users should stick to their own local accent/dialect/slang when commenting, and not adapt the Jamaican slang used by the artist in the video. The author states his nationality as English, and then goes off on a rant in Jamaican slang to prove the point that while he’s well-versed in this style of writing/talking, he normally uses a more standard British English to convey his message. Apparently his dialect includes no upper case letters (except sometimes the initial E in English), a mandatory blank space before every full stop, and a general lack of other punctuation and conjunctions.

Am I simply mocking this person? No, I’m quoting this comment because it represents an approach to accents with which I fundamentally disagree. While I believe that the author has a point in that there’s no real purpose for native speakers of various English dialects to alter their style of writing to better suit the contents of the video in question, other parts of the comment appear to me much less helpful.

My immediate response to reading this comment was What English dialect should Germans be using? Should they imitate a British or an American accent? A New York or an Alabama accent? Perhaps an Australian or a New Zealand accent? Or should they all be deliberately speaking English with a German accent, just in case? And does it make any difference if it’s a white German or a black German?

I battled with much the same questions during my school years. Attending an International Baccalaureate school here in Sweden I was often encouraged to imitate a British accent in speech, though it was never stated which one. Mainly because most students were more familiar with American English through television and movies, however, teachers soon gave up on this goal and replaced it with encouraging students to stick to one particular accent, as if interchangeable use of the words petrol and gasoline would somehow make a text incoherent.

At first, the justifications given by teachers were simply that British just sounds better and that British is the standard English. The former is of course a subjective viewpoint, while the latter is a strange/false/ill-informed statement. As any teacher of the English language should know, the details of language use on the British islands are changing with time, just like in every other area on Earth. Would it not make more sense, based on these arguments, for students to imitate Shakespeare or Chaucer? Or perhaps IB schools should go all out and teach 5th century Old English?

Later on the justifications changed form, with teachers now urging students to sound like a native. Although sometimes justified when commenting on unnatural pronunciation or poor grammar, it always bothered me when a student was corrected with the words this would immediately betray you as a non-native speaker. On these occasions I would always object by saying So what? I won’t be working as a spy. Because in what other contexts would your nationality be top secret? Why should we be so concerned with hiding our linguistic origins?

We shouldn’t. In fact, this reasoning could only be valid if students had been taught many different accents so that they could later somehow blend in with native English speakers from different parts of the world. Obviously this strategy is both impractical and unnecessary. After all, a German speaking flawless British English would only be mistaken for a native in Britain. In the company of, let’s say, Australians it would seem to make very little difference if this same person could be correctly identified as a German, or if he would be mistaken for an Englishman.

Thus I’m back to where I ended the previous entry: You are the only one speaking exactly like you. Suppressing your accent is hiding your past, and I can’t think of many situations in which this would be necessary or even desirable. I won’t say that making oneself understood is the only, although it’s certainly the main, purpose of language, but even when striving for beauty or artistic value these qualities may be closer than expected.

Re-reading the Youtube comment quoted at the beginning of this entry, it strikes me: Had the author not explicitly stated his nationality, I would never have guessed it. Either this user is not recognized as a native by his fellow Brits, or my teachers were wrong.