Accent on the wrong issue when it comes to speaking English.
Accent on the wrong issue when it comes to speaking English.
The Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, was asked this question by a reporter in Chicago during his 1992 presidential campaign: “Governor Clinton, you attended Oxford University in England and Yale Law School in the Ivy League, two of the finest institutions of learning in the world. So how come you still talk like a hillbilly?”
The reporter was referring to the fact that Mr Clinton hails from the South and speaks with a “southern” accent. Underlying the reporter’s question was the assumption that education should help get rid of one’s “undesirable” native accent.
I was reminded of that episode when I read some of the recent columns on accents that appeared in Education Post.
I am an applied linguist and, as one who has some acquaintance with prominent theories of second-language learning and teaching, I am amazed, if not amused, at the to-accent-or-not-to accent Hamlet-like dilemma repeatedly expressed by policy planners, educational administrators, business executives, teachers and parents in Hong Kong.
After all, what is an accent? It is no more than one’s way of speaking, the way one sounds when speaking, the way one uses sound features such as stress, rhythm, and intonation.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not just foreigners or second-language users who speak with an accent. Everybody speaks with one. Non-accent is non-existent. For instance, non-native speakers of English speak it with an accent that can be traced to their first language. That is how we know people who speak English with an Indian accent, German accent, Chinese accent, etc.
Those who speak English as their mother tongue speak it with an accent that can be traced to the geographic region and/or the social class they belong to. Thus, there are people who speak English with an American, Australian, or British accent. In fact, there are variations within these broad categories. Those who speak American English speak with a Boston, New York or southern accent. A British accent is not a monochrome accent either.
According to psycholinguists who study the mental processes governing language learning, the accent one acquires is determined by the sound system of the language one is exposed to during one’s childhood. They maintain that there is a “critical period” for language acquisition. It corresponds roughly to the first decade of one’s life. During this period, the language-learning circuitry of the human brain is very flexible. This flexibility is called “neuroplasticity”. As neurolinguist Steve Pinker explains, around about the age of 10 the brain begins to lose its neuroplasticity. The loss of neuroplasticity is confounded by lateralisation, a maturational process in which the complex mental activity of language development is lateralised to the left hemisphere of the brain. The natural biological processes of the loss of neuroplasticity and the onset of lateralisation appear to occur almost at the same time – around puberty. This may explain why children are considered biologically predisposed to be better language learners than adults.
To some extent, one can learn to speak a second language without a significant trace of first language sound systems if one learns it during one’s early childhood. Those who learn a second language after that will retain traces of their first language system.
There is a tendency to confuse intelligibility with accent. While the two are related, they are not the same. Intelligibility is about being understood by an individual or a group of individuals at a given time in a given communicative context. Even those who pronounce correctly and articulate clearly speak with an accent. Who can say Bill Clinton’s speech is not intelligible, although he talks “like a hillbilly?”
Yet another distinction that is normally not maintained in public discourse is the distinction between Standard English and standard accent. Standard English can be spoken with any variety of accent. Plain and simple. In spite of all the time and effort (not to speak of money) that have gone into the learning and teaching of English in Hong Kong, most educated Hong Kongers do not speak “Queen’s English” with a British accent, as far as I can tell. They speak proper, standard, intelligible English.
The angst and anxiety about accent seems to have reached such an epidemic proportion that in a recent article, a domestic helper bemoaned that it is not “realistic” for parents in Hong Kong to expect domestic maids to teach their children “English with no accent”. Nobody can teach English with no accent. They are being asked to do the impossible.
Without realising that accent has biological foundations, individuals and institutions go to great lengths to “reduce accent”. This fad is not confined to Hong Kong alone. In the US, a number of “accent modification clinics” have sprung up in places where there is a concentration of immigrants. There are also commercial agencies that put out newspaper ads telling gullible people that they can get rid of their unwanted accent in 30 days.
It appears as if speaking English with a native accent is treated as a communicative disorder.
I speak English with an Indian, or more precisely Tamil, accent because my mother tongue is Tamil. I never thought of my native accent as a communicative disorder any more than I thought of my skin colour as a physical disorder. My accent, like my skin colour, is a part of who I am. A part of my identity.
Relax Hong Kong. Your accent is part of your identity. Be proud of it.
-by Balasubramanian Kumaravadivelu
Professor of Applied Linguistics at San Jose State University, California
