The Heart of the Matter: Accent

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

“When I speak it is in order to be heard”

Roman Jakobson

Accent has bedeviled second language acquisition researchers since the field began with Chomsky’s conjectures over the innate nature of language. It seems we can’t quite determine why L2 learners have accents although we have lots of hypotheses. Some of these, when correlated, seem to explain some accents, but not all. Before we go there, it may be useful to see where we’ve come from.

In the era of behavioral psychology, structural linguistics and audolingual methodology, roughly the post WWII period through the 1960s, accent was considered something that only a native speaker could teach, and that a student of a second language had better get right. The stress on modeling and repetition meant that students would always hear the teacher’s voice in the ear as the last sounds of the drill, the practice or the lesson. Structural linguistics gave us contrastive analysis, which attributed pronunciation errors to the contrasts between L1 and L2. Indeed, In his seminal work Language, the behavioral linguist, Leonard Bloomfield, wrote of bilingualism as the phenomenon of being accepted as native by the L2 community. Under that standard, few students would qualify as bilingual speakers of a language. Accent would give even an advanced speaker away quickly while his grammar might do the same, but not quite so rapidly, perhaps.

In the sixties, child language studies gave us several new ideas. The first was that phonetic mastery of a language was developmental. English-speaking children typically have problems with certain sounds of the language: the retroflex/lateral distinction, consonant clusters, voiced/voiceless plosives in the same word, interdental fricatives, and so on. The second idea was that mastery of the first language seemed to work on some innate grammatical principles such that the environment and the physical development of the child contrived in tandem to bring about a fairly full grammar by age 4 or so, and not just for English speakers. Crosscultural studies seemed to show the same results. One daunting concept from that era is Lenneberg’s Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), which indicates that there is a finite amount of developmental time in the life of the child for mastery of the first language, usually put at puberty. In terms of second language learning, which took its first steps based on first language studies and methodology, it became clear that L2 students of English would exhibit developmental errors in their interlanguage which were not products of their first languages interfering with their L2 learning. Thus, accent was not purely a product of the contrast between L1 and L2.

The CPH indicated that students learning English after puberty would likely not become as fluent in it as in their first languages, and one of the manifestations of this would be a clear accent in the L2. This finding, verified in more than one study, seemed to make an argument for starting children early in their L2 so that they would have a chance to truly master the language, including a native accent.

A bit later on in second language studies, researchers with a psychosocial perspective made the argument that accent is something that binds the L2 speaker of English to his or her L1 group, so that a native-like accent might estrange the L2 English speaker from that primary group, be it family or friends. This implied that there was some sort of choice being made by the L2 student, whether deliberate or sub-conscious. Other researchers began to look at the context of L2 learning, whether in the classroom or naturalistic. For some, L2 learners who were socially marked by their lack of fluency and their accents, were victims of an oppressive host culture which denied them their own voices, without which they would never truly succeed in that society or that language.

One unique perspective on language learning was that of Caleb Gattegno. In his book, The Universe of Babies, Gattegno contends that the primary experience of language is its melody and rhythm. In his teaching method, The Silent Way, the melody and the rhythm of a second language were stressed from the first lesson.

Interestingly, recent first language acquisition research has shown us that indeed, the melody and rhythm of the first language is what a neonate responds to. Other studies in second language accent indicate that the prosodic features of a language: rhythm, stress, and intonation, may be more important for fluency and accent than native-like mastery of the phones and phonemes of a particular language.

In the 21^st century world of instant communication, most English speakers have come to know others who speak English with quite different accents from their own, no matter which side of the Atlantic they are on. Americans are now used to having Indians help them with their tech problems and Irishmen with their financial choices. There are about 230 million native speakers of English in the world and just as many native speakers of Spanish, yet the estimate of those who speak English as a Second Language is about one billion. Furthermore, there are over fifty countries where English is an official language, often one of several official languages, and there are major countries where English is the de facto language such as the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Given the reality of the world, accent is indeed in the ear of the beholder. However, it is no secret that for certain cultures certain English accents are more pleasing, more romantic or more prestigious than others. For Americans, French and British correspond to these characteristics.

The world is coming together via social media and satellite broadcasting, and accent will be a permanent part of that world. English, as the lingua franca of that world, is a necessary part of that coming together. An emphasis on clear and effective communication will signal the successful speaker of English as a Second Language.

How much accent interferes with or enhances that standard is an open question. Esperanto is not going to be a world language, English is and will be for the future until Chinese, perhaps, overtakes it in usefulness for business and diplomacy. The acceptance of Englishes and not one kind of English or even two or three kinds of English will be a part of the quotidian everywhere, sooner or later. We need to get used to accents of various kinds and accept them as different without judging them as defective. At the same time, the emphasis on global communication will eventually preserve the narrowness and resistance to change of written English while widening the net of acceptability of spoken English. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote once.

Please check the Pronunciation course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the British Life, Language and Culture course at Pilgrims website.