Monthly Archives: March 2015

Occupational hazards

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Every now and again, due to the nature of our work at the university, we get phone calls or emails from the press, from restaurants, from grandmothers, and whoever else who decides they need an “expert” opinion about English.

This week, I got a phone call from Ilta Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper that is probably best characterized as borderline tabloid journalism. It’s much more The Sun than it is The Times, let’s say. They wanted someone to evaluate a video clip featuring the heads of Finland’s nine political parties speaking English. There is a big election coming up, after all.

I am not at all comfortable with this type of task. My initial reaction was to turn this task down. It was a terrible story for the paper to pursue in the first place, I thought. They know full well that language is as divisive a topic as there is, and that is exactly the point. Language and politics? Oh, hell yeah. Why not go ahead and throw religion into the mix, as well, to really go for it?

In my teaching and research, I strive to work against negative stereotypes and attitudes about the way people speak. I sure do not want to add fuel to the fire. Not only that, but I have very strong feelings about native speakers of English (or any other language, for that matter) being elevated to some revered status, just because they are native speakers. Yawn. So boring. So colonial. So pointless. But in my case, I am not “just” a native speaker, I am also a trained linguist, and, furthermore, a descriptive sociolinguist. I agreed to do the interview because I thought my views might not be as ugly as the next person they might call, frankly.

So I agreed to do the task and complete the interview, although I am still not sure I made the right decision. I watched and listened to the video and commented about it out loud while I spoke on the phone to the journalist. (Of course the journalist took the most inane, off-hand comment I offered and turned it into the headline and the main point of the story, but that is another issue).

All in all, the story could have turned out much worse. I guess I made my point about being a descriptive linguist. There were a couple of misses in terms of the quotations, but this is not surprising considering that the interview was conducted in English, and, not only that, but some of the linguistic terminology I used clearly went over the journalist’s head.

But the part that really disturbs me? The readers’  comments that have been posted online in response to the story. As of tonight, there are more than 300 comments from readers, and they are not pretty. The attitudes displayed about language, linguistic rights, and also, actually, about me, are interesting as to what they reveal, but also quite horrifying.

No doubt I should have heeded my initial reaction instead of agreeing to do this evaluation. Did I do the wrong thing by agreeing to the interview? In the larger scheme of things, I realize this is not a huge issue, but I am disappointed that I participated in something that goes against my philosophy as a linguist.

Here is the link to the story: http://www.iltasanomat.fi/vaalit2015/art-1426818757096.html#comments-anchor

 

 

 

 

“I love your accent!”

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Last week, while travelling in the UK, I experienced a first:

“I love your accent,” the man working at a cafe said to me when I ordered my drink.

I blinked at him in confusion.

“You love my accent?” I asked, looking around behind me to make sure he wasn’t talking to someone else.

I’m American. Furthermore, I am from the American West, which is by many considered to be a linguistic wasteland — look at any dialect map of the United States, and you will see a vast expanse of nothing, stretching (depending on the map and the features it illustrates) from either the Atlantic coast or at least from the Midwest, all the way to the Pacific Coast. My variety of American English is as general as general gets.

“Yes, I love the way you talk. In fact, your coffee is on the house,” he said emphatically.

I blushed and mumbled something about him making my day.* I am not one to say “no” to a free coffee.

No one “loves” the General American accent. Even Americans don’t love the General American accent. Ask any American about who speaks better, a Brit or an American, and that person will wax on and on about how wonderful British English is (yes, I am generalizing, but studies actually confirm this generalization). Do Brits have the same love for American English that we have for theirs? Heavens no! Pretty much since the time of the Founding Fathers, Brits have been blaming Americans for “ruining” English. (And for a host of other problems, of course.)

We Americans and our accent assault the airwaves and the media of ever corner of the globe. We are so commonplace as to render ourselves mute. No one even hears an American anymore, it seems. It’s all just background noise.

Here is an example.

One day, in downtown Helsinki, I sat with two friends, both from the UK, who were catching up on old times. One of the friends has a London accent, and the other is from Yorkshire. They were going on and on about the time they had studied together, and the four-letter words were flying. I mean, their vocabulary made me cringe. The server at the cafe, a woman in about her twenties, set down our drinks, turned to my friends, who barely stopped long enough to hear her say– and very distinctly only  to them:

“I just love the way you talk!”

I was speaking English too, of course, but my voice didn’t count. Why? Because I am just another American. It didn’t matter if the stream of words coming out of their mouth would make a sailor blush, my friends were speaking British English, and that, in and of itself, made up for any amount of four-letter words. Their speech is “beautiful,” and mine is dull, common, everyday.

Even in places like Finland (where English is widely used as a foreign language) studies show that British English is considered more sophisticated, learned, and eloquent. Yet, oddly, many people, like the students of English at the university, for example, end up speaking English that sounds more American than British, simply for the reason already stated: they get more input in American English through various forms of media. It feels more “natural” for many of them–not all–to speak with an American accent.

And that is the double bind: American English is ubiquitous, which makes it somehow less special.

So of course I had to write a blog entry about the observation from a stranger:

“I love your accent.”

Chances are it is the only time in my life I’ll ever hear those words.

*I should noted that it was pretty clear that the man was not hitting on me; I have reached an age where that sort of thing just doesn’t happen. I really have no reason to believe he did not mean it when he said he loves my accent!