Have you ever wondered why you almost inevitably have an accent when you try to speak a foreign language and what your true feelings about this are, why some accents you find endearing, whereas others turn you off? This post contains an assortment of ideas, some rational, some broadly scientific, some anecdotal, and some personal, about accents of all kinds. My hope is that you will find them helpful in clarifying your own feelings about accent, the ultimate aim being to perform better and get more fun out of speaking your own and foreign languages.
Like all talking, doing it in a foreign language is an adventure: you never know in advance how you’re going to sound or how the listener is going to react to what you (are trying to) say. You might make mistakes of grammar and prosody, forget and confuse words and end up producing something a long way from what you intended to say. All these things can happen, happily, with decreasing frequency as you progress. But there is one thing that dogs most of us permanently and mysteriously, that unfailing mark of failure: accent.
Now, accent is not something you can lose (primarily because no sane person ever actually tries to lose something on purpose). Nor is accent-free speech an option, since accent means ‘a certain way of articulating sounds (particularly vowels and, to a lesser extent, consonants), within certain prosodic patterns (aka rhythm and intonation)’. The only way not to have an accent of some kind is to keep stumm. Speakers who claim not to have an accent are either unaware that they have one, have a mixed accent, or speak with the standard accent of their country. Recall that standard American, standard New Zealand and standard British accents are very different from each other. There is no monolithic ‘English accent’, any more than there is ‘the British accent’ or ‘the American accent’. This holds true for our attempts to speak foreign languages, too: someone from Aberdeen, someone from Cape Town and someone from Los Angeles will not, a priori, sound the same when speaking Russian.
At any given moment, your way of speaking consists of three ingredients:
1) permanent voice-quality, determined by the physiological configuration of your vocal tract (thorax, larynx, pharynx, mouth and nose). Insofar as it distinguishes you as an individual, it can be said to be an I-thing.
2) temporary voice quality, determined by the situation in which you find yourself, which may call for variations in, for example, tempo, loudness, breathiness, or musicality. It can therefore be described as a here-and-now-thing.
3) accent, determined by, inter alia, your birthplace, who you hang out with, who you identify with and who you want to be. Accent is less permanent than permanent voice quality, but more permanent than temporary voice quality. The first important thing to note about it is that it marks you out not as an individual, not as someone who is having to shout, in order to be heard, or whisper, for the opposite reason, but as a member of a group, be it social (including political), or geographical, or both. It is therefore a we-thing.
It is because accent is a we-thing that it is simultaneously exclusive and inclusive. It says to the listener: ‘Hey, we come from the same area!’ and/or ‘We are likely to have, for example, similar incomes, tastes, values, ages.’ Or, it says the opposite: ‘We hail from different districts, towns, counties, countries, even hemispheres!’ and/or ‘We belong to different social groups and are, a priori, unlikely to get along.’ A second important thing to note: your accent is emotionally charged and can attract or repel, fascinate or irritate, reassure or worry, impress or bore the person you are talking to. Your accent is part of your social being, much more than your grammar or the words you use.
A third important thing to note: given that, as any phonetician will tell you, no speech sound, or sequence of sounds, is intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant, it is not the strictly the accent itself that affects the listener emotionally, but his or her perception of social group who use it, of the place where it is spoken, or perhaps another speaker of the same accent, to whom he or she reacts favourably or unfavourably.
Accent is a tool a speaker consciously or unconsciously uses, or a badge worn, not always, but very often, with pride. However rough and local or snobbish and overbearing some listeners might find it, the speaker knows that somewhere there are numbers of other people who will find it pleasant and reassuring, because they themselves have a similar one, or wish they did, or could allow themselves to. Accordingly, there is no such thing as ‘covert’ prestige.
Some people choose, for social or professional reasons, to modify their accent, so as to bring it into conformity with the norms of a group with which they seek to identify. Recall that they don’t lose their original accent: they can‒if they want to‒revert to it at any time. What they do is develop a second accent that goes with their acquired identity. A fourth important thing to note is that accent does not just symbolise membership of a particular social group: it is an inherent feature of that group, along with the way they dress, the way they look at you, even their hairstyle and what they consume: it would be unimaginable for a member of the British royal family to speak with a heavy Birmingham accent, just as it would be for one of the regulars at a Glasgow working men’s pub who decided he would adopt the upper class British accent known as RP (Received Pronunciation) could survive for long. To assume a second, parallel accent is never an innocent move. It is often less than successful and can generate mistrust in listeners and anxiety in the speaker: fiddling about with your accent is not something to embark upon lightly, any more than is getting yourself tattooed or undergoing plastic surgery.
There is, despite the regional and personal differences mentioned above, a fairly stable, general and therefore predictable, set of pronunciation errors that British English speakers make, when attempting to speak foreign languages. For example, depending on where they are from, they tend to drop the /r/-sound before consonants and at the end of words, they reduce the vowels of what they consider (for whatever reason) to be unimportant syllables to the ‘colourless’ central vowel /ə/ (called a schwa), which is found at the beginning of again, in the middle of escalate and at the end of honour. Also, rather more delicately, but nonetheless noticeably to, for example, French listeners, they add a little puff of air to the consonants /p/, /t/ and /k/ before what they think should be a stressed vowel, resulting in their rendering of the French word caractère sounding something like /karəktʰeə/. These recurring errors, along with practically no lip protrusion (yes, the stiff upper lip exists: watch them doing it!) give a permanent air of ‘Britishness’ to their speech. They are its substance, unlike sporadic vocabulary or grammatical errors, which are noticed occasionally, by the listener. These speakers might as well be wearing a Union Jack shirt, or carrying a cricket bat under their arm. Sometimes foreign accent is so strong as to give the impression of two languages being spoken simultaneously, the forms of one being embedded in the substance of the other. It is as if the speaker has agreed to use the grammar and the words of the target language, but refuses to do so in any way but that of his group (in this case ‘we British’). One is reminded of people who are prepared to eat exotic dishes in an oriental restaurant, but damned if they will do it with chopsticks: they arbitrarily‒and mistakenly‒separate the action from the way it’s done and, in attempting to be both adventurous and stay-at-homes, end up as neither.
Most of us revert to type in this way and make a pig’s ear of the phonology of languages we might have been learning for years, settling for a poor accent, and to hell with it. The good news is that this is not a universal. There are exceptions: people who, despite having begun learning a foreign language as a teenager or even as an adult, acquire an accent indistinguishable from that of a native speaker. What’s more, it is not just a matter of saying a few words: they can keep it up for an indefinite amount of time. Sad to relate, notwithstanding a working life spent in the language business, I am not one of these blessed souls. But I have met a few of them. One or two are university people, one is an Italian washing machine dealer with impeccable French, another was a lad I worked with on a Norwegian coastal steamer back in 1972, whose English was unnerving.
One very noticeable thing about the performance of these individuals is how effortless they make it appear. Watch Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dance , or Wilhelm Kempff play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and you will see what I mean. It’s as if all the hard work has been done long ago and all that is left for them to do now is reap the benefits. This illusion of ease comes from the confidence that these great artists’ almost fanatical love of precision gives them. Now the linguistic counterparts of these superb professionals may just be hard-wired differently from us lesser mortals, or‒and this is what is worth looking into‒from the outset, they do things the rest of us don’t have time for, omit to do, get wrong, or are prevented from doing by faulty teaching or by teachers whose own pronunciation is poor and are themselves ignorant of what a good accent consists of, or how to teach it.
The well-worn‒yet impossible to substantiate‒hypothesis that we cannot satisfactorily reproduce the sounds of a target language because our ears are not fine-tuned to them, so that we never develop anything like an accurate representation of them in auditory memory, may be true in some cases. However, most students of a given language will have realized, despite their own perhaps poor accent, that they can easily tell the speech of other learners, more advanced than themselves, from that of native speakers. They can recognise the real McCoy alright, but that doesn’t, in the vast majority of cases, mean they can reproduce it, which leaves us with a psycho-motor (brain-to-articulators) problem, not a psycho-auditory (ear-to-brain) one. The same phenomenon underlies our ability to tell a stage Cockney accent from a genuine one, even though we are incapable of producing either ourselves.
There is another, closely related idée reçue, which has, unaccountably, attained almost universal acceptance. This is the so-called Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH). In its strongest form, it states that a rigidification of the audio-perceptual system sets in around puberty, practically shutting out, or at least relegating to the dustbin, anything which is irrelevant to the phonological system of our language (strictly speaking: the variety of our language we speak). This strikes me as being complete nonsense, given that, 1) if it were a biological necessity, as are ageing and death, there would be no exceptions (but there are!); 2) since each variety, within what goes under the blanket name of a language (best thought of as loose federation of related dialects) has its own, autonomous phonological system, the CPH would leave anyone older than thirteen of fourteen totally insensitive to the often subtle differences between different regional or social accents, which is patently false.
It seems more likely that, behind the supposed biological rigidification, lie attitudinal and behavioural changes, which often, but not universally, accompany puberty. Among these, a common one might be the realization, referred to above, that an action and the way of performing it are often in an arbitrary (i.e. culturally and educationally determined) relation, and can be separated, without greatly affecting the result. Unlike children, who tend to acknowledge only one way of doing things (i.e. the way they have been taught), adolescents and young adults often revel in doing things in newly-discovered ways. Hence the appeal of the song “I Did it my Way”. Children can often reproduce sounds, however exotic, very precisely, and often derive pleasure from doing so. Alas, within a few years, we ‘grow out of’ this and are more interested in reproducing approximations of them that suit our personality, or conform to the norms of our peer group, thus deflecting any possible ridicule from ourselves onto the target language, its speakers or (even more enjoyably) onto the teacher. How many of us have not joined in the mirth of the schoolroom created by pupils who deliberately pronounce French with the broadest of Liverpool accents? We’ve got our identity to think about and preserve. We are what we are‒and damned if we’re going to be taken in by any of that foreign nonsense! So, we get into the habit‒maybe quite unconsciously‒of going through the motions of speaking the target language, but not in a way that could mark us out as a traitor or a teacher’s pet. We forget that target language words constantly mispronounced are no longer target language words: we are pretending to speak the language and nothing more. But just who do we think we’re fooling? There are many, more or less successful, ways of, say, doing the shopping or driving a car or eating spaghetti, but there is only one way to produce a given sound in a given variety of a given language. If we do it any other way, we spoil the result, because in this game, the means is the end. It is my guess that great performers (including great speakers of foreign languages), albeit unconsciously in some cases, forego their own preconceived ideas about how to achieve a given result, having perceived‒and accepted‒that the desired result and the way to achieve it are inseparable. This would point to an insight that most of us don’t have, or choose to ignore, or are too busy‒or too lazy‒to attempt to implement. One explanation might be that highly successful speakers of a foreign language are people who had, or have, only very tenuous links with their original peer group and are, in fact, in search of the person they would be if they had been born in the country of that language. A tip: when trying to learn Belfast pronunciation some years ago, I found it very helpful to imagine that I actually
was a Belfast friend of mine. Thanks, Brendan!
To get Freudian‒and idealistic‒for a moment, we should remember that the mother tongue is not so-called by chance. For most human beings, it is the language (in its widest sense) of our first, prolonged, tender, reassuring, and, if we managed to get our own way, exclusive and gratifying, relationship with the person who cared for us, who was (apparently!) devoted to us and who, accordingly, we would never take the risk of alienating. Now, it might conceivably be the case that for many of us, to take off completely, body and soul, into a foreign language, feels like cutting a symbolical umbilical cord, with the accompanying terror of not being able to tie it up again. That could explain something of the anxiety that accompanies speaking, as opposed to listening to a foreign language. Listening can also trigger all sorts of emotions, of course, but not typically, angst. If there is something in this, it might be reflected in the relaxed and confident air that superb pronouncers of foreign languages have: they know there is no danger of losing their mother tongue, no matter how long they spend using another one. Alternatively, these special individuals may be reaping the benefits of a perfectly loving, and confidence-providing, but not over-possessive or too heavily prescriptive, relationship with the mother figure. Just a thought.
To come back to listening, though native language acquisition is quite a different kettle of fish from second language learning, there are nonetheless some common points between them, one of which is‒or should be‒the primacy of listening. Recall that most infants not only spend months of intra-uterine life being sensitized to the vibrations, tunes and rhythms of their mother’s speech, transmitted via the amniotic fluid, but also, once in the outside world, they are subjected to at least twelve more months of (usually benevolent) speech coming at them from all directions, before they decide to embark upon their own‒cool, modest and usually well-received‒attempts at the speaking game. In sharp contradistinction to this, the first lesson in the average foreign language class pressurizes learners to speak from the word “go”, without leaving them so much as five minutes to swim around amniotically in the language and get a feel for it. This is like asking students at an art class for beginners to set about copying the Mona Lisa, under the critical eye of a professional, the very first morning. It has often been observed that people who are dropped into the environment of a language of which they are totally ignorant, do not typically choose to say anything much for weeks or even months. No. Their natural reflex appears to consist in listening and observing, in order to assimilate as much information as possible before the launch into speech. To use a military analogy, a general who disregards the need for a steady build-up of arms, men, supplies and intelligence before launching an offensive will inevitably come to grief. His mistaken haste can lead to an appalling waste of life. To compel learners to speak from the word “go” in a language they do not know often generates embarrassment and anxiety. What people tend to do when anxious is lose control and regress to archaic forms of behaviour, searching for the reassurance of familiar patterns and codes. What better place to find these than in the mother tongue? So, the scene is set for an endless routine of pretending to speak the target language, but, as opposed to the relatively cool intellectual processes of slotting words into grammar, the obviously physical aspects of speech, (sounds, intonation, stress patterns and rhythm) are largely, or even entirely, those of the mother tongue, as if they are saying to the mother figure: Mummy, as you can see and hear, I am not deserting you‒never could and never will! My contention is that ongoing and practically incurable foreign accent, may well be, for a majority of learners, a teaching-induced phenomenon that could easily be avoided. It would be wrong to talk of an ‘appalling waste of life’ in even the worst of foreign language classes, but it is not an exaggeration to talk of an appalling waste of potential competent speakers! Click here to see an article about how to set up a silent (pre-speaking) period in language classes.
Oh, Goodness, yes! It is always a moment of pure pleasure when native speakers compliment you on the skill with which you manage to speak their language. If pressed, they invariably admit that you do, nonetheless have a faint trace of a difficult-to-pinpoint foreign accent, making up for this disappointment by telling you it gives you a particular charm, etc., etc. What a faint foreign accent also does for you is protect you from embarrassment, and even hostility: if, in the middle of a conversation, a highly competent speaker suddenly reveals a cultural gap, which puzzles the interlocutor, who had taken him or her for a native, the ensuing scene can be difficult to handle. A foreign accent is a badge which gives advance warning of your handicap, encouraging natives to treat you with indulgence. After all, it’s only to be expected that an English person should have some sort of English accent. When he or she appears not to have one, something’s wrong somewhere! Those of us who nonetheless achieve native competence in a foreign language clearly are not afraid of sticking their neck out. They’re going totus porcus for complete authenticity, whatever the risk. That may be what makes them so special.
I have the privilege of having two French friends who have unquestionably achieved complete mastery of English pronunciation (in the widest sense of English). Their strategy has been to focus on one local variety. In one case, it was Barnsley (West Yorkshire), in the other, Glasgow (South-West Scotland). English is today so widely spoken, that the number of accents kicking about is absolutely staggering. This is great news for linguists, but bewildering for foreign learners. These two friends of mine understood‒apparently from the outset‒the absolute need for, on the one hand, a clear, relatively fixed target and, on the other hand, an almost fanatical fondness for the culture, traditions, look, tastes and general world-view, of the people living in target area and/or operating within the target group. Now we don’t all have the means to go and soak up the local colour 100% of the time, over long periods. What we can, and must do, however, is decide on the precise variety of the language we are aiming at in our speech, to the exclusion of all others, at least during our apprenticeship. This doesn’t mean we should turn off the television for fear of contamination every time a speaker with an accent other than our chosen one opens his or her mouth: on the contrary, in order better to delineate what we are after, it is very useful to know what we are not after, quite apart from the necessity of getting used to coping receptively with all sorts of accents. How many learners of English, nurtured on good old RP have been traumatised on first arriving in Britain and finding that no-one they can find actually speaks like that?
You may have seen that fascinating BBC documentary How the Edwardians spoke. See it again on You Tube , presented by the wonderfully talented theatre and cinema accent coach Joan Washington. Now, she sets great store by rhythm, intonation, pitch range and overall articulatory posture, drawing attention, for example to the habitually low-register, narrow range male Geordie, as opposed to the variable up and down of their womenfolk. How many teachers of languages, I wonder, have ever drawn their learners’ attention to what Joan refers to as accents habitually in ‘minor key’, e.g. Birmingham, contrasting with North Yorkshire, spoken in ‘major key’? She relates accent to landscape, giving East Anglia as an illustration of her claim that the flatter the landscape, the flatter the accent, and also, to climate, pointing out the lack of nasality common to the accents of ports such as Aberdeen, Liverpool and New York, owing to speakers having ‘bunged up noses’ a lot of the time. Now, to my mind, this is the stuff to show to language learners: have them focus on phonetic-acoustic detail by watching and listening to videos of a range of speakers, then choose the one they want as their personal target. It literally brings language learning to life, personalises it, and makes it great fun. Just look how happy and relaxed Joan is when switching from one accent to another and telling us about them! Thirty years ago, the technology required to put learners in daily contact with their target accent was simply not available. Today it is. There is no excuse for not making use of it.
A final point concerns speech rate. As we progress in a foreign language, we discover, to our glee, that words and grammatical routines come to us more and more readily, enabling us to accelerate our rate of words per minute. Now, this is a danger. If we are going to maintain a good accent, it is essential that we limit our speech rate to a speed that allows us to maintain adequate distinctions between sounds and leaves us time to get the rhythm and intonation right. If we succumb to the temptation of speaking at speeds prompted by our control of grammar and vocabulary, we are likely to spoil our accent. The answer is to speak at a good, steady rate at which we feel phonologically comfortable. No-one ever got any credit for gabbling, but a nice accent is a joy forever.
The points I have tried to make in this post are as follows:
- The notion that an accent can be deliberately lost is a non-starter.
- There is no such thing as accent-less speech.
- Accent is a we-thing: it tells the listener about what social and/or regional group you belong to and those you don’t belong to.
- A perceived accent is brought about by the habitual way sounds are articulated; rhythm, pitch range and an overall posture or set, typical of users of the accent.
- Accents are emotionally charged.
- Foreign accent is not inevitable. Likely contributing factors include the ‘grown up’ predilection for ‘doing it my way’ instead of doing it the way the natives do it; too early an insistence on speaking on the part of teachers and the materials they use; the lack of a precise and stable target; copping out by imagining that there’s no hope of progressing phonologically after puberty (after all, we progress in other ways!); fear of betraying one’s peers, be they physically present or simply imagined; lack of confidence and (who knows?) an unconscious fear of losing Mummy.
- Don’t over-stretch your phonological skill by trying to speak too fast.
In conclusion: Achieving a near-perfect accent in a foreign language is within the reach of most of us, by which I mean that we could, with the right attitude, determination, devotion, keen, unprejudiced observation and learning strategy, get a lot closer to perfection than we usually do. Of course, it takes a certain amount of effort: Fred Astaire didn’t learn to dance in a couple of weeks, and every one of his routines was rehearsed and re-rehearsed until it simply couldn’t go wrong. At the same time, to be able to speak with a near-perfect accent is rewarding, it is fun and it gives one confidence, even if there are gaps in the vocabulary and the grammar is shaky in places. Above all, it is a fascinating and enjoyable component‒all too often neglected‒of the language-learning process. Remember: accent is not an optional extra: it is a fundamental part of using the language. Identify the target and go for it!
Happy learning and happy speaking!
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