This week’s blog post looked at chapter 5 of
McKay and Bokhorts-Heng and also Lippie and Green’s English with an Accent:
Language ideology, and discrimination in the United States.
The book discusses Platt’s idea that when a
variety of a language develops it doesn’t happen in isolation but depends on
the communicative needs of those who speak and write it. I heard a statistic that
today there are actually even more L2 English speakers than native speakers. Brutt-Griffler
uses the term macroacquisition to describe the process of SLA by speech communities
in their own local contexts. English is in contact with so many other languages
and used by bilinguals on a daily basis. English is a feature in cultures that have
very different food, garments, cultural ceremonies etc. It’s really interesting
and logical that language is going to need to vary to be relevant to the people
using it. Why would we expect people from all around the around the world to
adopt our idea of “Standard English” when there are variations of English
within our own country? Variations of English through words and expressions help
fulfill communicative needs in cultural contexts in which they act. English is
not a “one size fits all” but needs to serve the speakers in the best way it
can. I like the example the book
provides about South African communities where the word “sister” is used for
any female regardless of the relationship. I feel like this use of English
says a lot about the South African culture.
The chapter also discusses standard language
ideology which we have talked about in class before. How this term refers to a
variety of a language that is seen as the norm and is used in schools, like
Standard English. Randolph Quirk said that variation in language use is
educationally damaging in Anglophone countries. Kachru had argued that the spread
of English means we need to reexamine traditional notions of standardization and
codification. Why do we believe Standard English is correct and not damaging?
If we are now the minority of English speakers, should this standard be revisited?
The article English with an accent defined a
word a lot of us use without a second thought. But what are we really saying
when we say “he had a thick accent” or “it was hard to understand her because
her accent”. Accents are said to distinguish stress in words or this term is used
to define a specific way of speaking. While the article defines this definition
of an accent as loose bundles of prosodic and segmental features over
geographic and/or social space it also distinguishes between first language and
second language accents. L1 accents are structured variation in language. Each one of
us is a speaker of a variety whether it is geographic, associated to our
gender, race, ethnicity, income or religion or other elements of social identity.
Have you ever been told you have an
“accent”? Why do you think this happened? The article also discusses dialect. I liked how it was said that “language
is a dialect with an army and a navy”. That dialects are languages that get no
respect. After watching the documentary American Tongues last semester I realized
how many people who speak dialects that are variations of Standard English feel like it negatively affects them. Some even feel like they need to lose
this dialect, the way the speak to succeed, to be taken seriously and to gain
respect. If none of us are truly speakers of Standard English why do speakers
like the ones in the documentary need to change how they speak?
L2 accent is also discussed and said that when a
native speaker of a language other than English acquires English sometimes
their native language phonology shows up in the target language and is seen as
an accent. Khakua is a bilingual speaker of English and Hawai’ian Creole English
(HCE) who didn’t get a job he was qualified for because of his “hawai’ian accent”
and when he sued the employer under Title Vii of the civil rights act, he lost
because the judge believed it was reasonable for people to want radio announcers
to speaks standard English and possible for speakers to control their language.
Can we really correct this? Our author discusses if speakers are able to
correct it, it is only temporary. He states that children are born with the ability
to produce the entire set of possible sounds but restrict themselves over time
to the ones they hear around them. In English 344 we looked at a study which
exposed children to sounds outside their native language regularly,
specifically children of Japanese and English speakers. It showed when children were
exposed to say the l and r sound which are unfamiliar to Japanese they
responded better to these sounds later on, opposed to children not exposed to
these sounds early on, and later id not respond to these English sounds.
I really like the author’s idea of a sound
house, that as children we build a sound house with the materials available to
us and we imitate those around us. The author
proposes that if people are exposed to more than one sound hose as a child they
have the resources and tools to make them but we are unable to do so when we’re
older because the materials to build these sound houses are no long available.
Reading this article and hearing Khakua 's story reminded me of my mom. While my mother is a native speaker of English,
she is from a region of the U.S. where speakers have very prominent and noticeable speech patterns opposed to us
here in the Chicago area. When she moved from her hometown and to the Chicago area
she was placed in speech therapy. While she had not been seen as having any speech
problems at her previous school, suddenly her speech was a deficit. Today, you wouldn't doubt that she is a Chicago native. However, when she speaks to anyone from her
hometown it’s like a light switch and she uses terms and pronunciation
different from her everyday speech. Would this apply to the idea that modification
to our speech are only temporary? Is it different because she
speaks varieties of the same language?
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