Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 3; May 2000

"You are what you speak"

by John R. Yamamoto-Wilson, Sophia University, Tokyo

It all began, I suppose, when I was on holiday with my grandmother as a little child. I lived with my parents in south London, but my grandmother lived in a little milltown a few miles outside of Manchester. I particularly remember the welcoming party that turned up on the doorstep just after I arrived on my second visit - a little group of local kids, asking if John could come out and play.

Off I went, bags still unpacked after the long train ride, chattering away happily with my gang of friends. We hadn't reached the corner of the street, though, before one of them (a lad called Ian, whose mother owned a sweet shop) turned to me disconsolately and said, 'Ee, John. Yer've changed.'

The problem? I hadn't had time to adjust and slip into the Lancashire accent I'd acquired on my previous visit. Quickly recovering myself, I said, 'Lewk! They're knockin' down tharrold chimney!' The moment of awkwardness passed, and we straggled over to where one of the old mills was being dismantled.

Getting back home after these visits was just as much of a problem. The Lancashire accent which I adopted so easily on arrival would take days to wear off on my return. Part of that was because of my Uncle Bernard. He figured large in my visits to Lancashire. He and my aunt were childless, so they made much of me when I was a little boy. Uncle Bernard taught me to ride a horse, and as far as I was concerned he was the coolest thing on two legs. I modelled myself on him, right down to the last deep-toned modulation of his Lancashire accent.

My mother was horrified when her little boy returned to her with a Lancashire accent so broad you could cut it with a knife. I adopted it partly because I admired my uncle and partly because it was crucial to fitting in with the local kids. Underneath it all, though, I was, surely, the same John? Not so, apparently. To my mother I was quite clearly not the same. Although she'd spent most of her childhood in Lancashire she'd shed her northern accent over the years (the flat 'a' was the last to go; the last vestige of being a northerner is the sense that saying 'barth' is somehow absurd). She had not been born in Lancashire, and never really felt she fitted in there. By losing the accent she defined herself as not being Lancastrian, and by adopting it I was, in her eyes, defining myself, asserting an identity. Not that she believed it was a stable or viable identity; in her eyes it was doomed to failure.

'You have to be born there and live there and die there if you want to be really accepted as one of them,' she'd say. Like her own sister, my aunt, who, being a few years younger than my mother, was born after my grandparents moved to Lancashire, never left, and never thought of herself as anything other than Lancastrian.

I couldn't quite agree with my mother. During those long summers in Lancashire I was, to all intents and purposes, a Lancashire lad - at least, I thought I was. There are two incidents which stick in my mind, and make me feel that perhaps I was not. One was when I was there with my younger brother and he was picking a fight with a lad a couple of years younger than himself. I interceded on behalf of the younger kid, and all the other children were scandalised.

'Ee, ah'm goonna tell yer Gran on you,' Ian said.

'Why?' I was completely nonplussed. No one would have known, from my speech, that I wasn't just another Lancashire lad, but this incident revealed another level of 'Lancashireness', one that I was simply unaware of.

'Ye're not stickin goop fer yer broother.'

'Raht, well, ah won' stick oop fer 'im 'coz 'e's wrong,' I said, but they couldn't really accept that. The accent was pat, but my thought patterns were utterly alien.

The other incident was much more serious. My brother and I were leaving the next day. We'd told the others we'd be going back to London, but that then my family would be moving to Southampton, even further south. I don't know whether it was these details of a life beyond their horizon that roused bad feeling in our little gang, or whether they somehow sensed that this would be the last of my visits (I have never seen any of them since). The simple fact of the matter is that Tonini (a local lad of Italian extract) took my brother into a back alley, picked up a brick and punched him in the stomach, brick in hand. I would have been twelve at the time, my brother eight, and Tonini about ten. The rest of the gang sided with Tonini, and for the next couple of hours they circled the block on bicycles, throwing stones at us as they passed, while we took potshots at them with crossbows (toy ones, but quite effective, nonetheless) that we had recently acquired on a shopping trip with my grandparents.

Since the complex issues of language and identity which beset my childhood (when we actually got to Southampton the kids, for some reason, defined me as 'Scottish'; I was born in Northumberland but had never even been to Scotland!) I have travelled extensively and spent long periods living abroad (notably in Spain and Japan). Language, and its underlying code of behaviour and even moral assumptions, is something I have grown ever more keenly aware of.

One significant formative event was on the occasion of my first visit abroad, as a 16 year old. My host family's car had broken down on the way to the airport in Corsica, and we missed our flight to Paris. The father of the family was dead, and the eldest son had left Corsica ahead of us, so there was just the mother and the two younger sisters. I immediately stepped into the role of eldest male in a Latin family, blowing my top at the sardonic, nonchalant officials at Ajaccio airport. This worked a treat. They immediately set to finding us seats on another plane, and I was swept away on a wave of exuberance. When we got to Paris, I took my leave of the family and got a connecting flight to London. My bags, however, were not on the same plane as I was. My attempts to use the same kind of fiery outrage on the English airport officials as I had used in Corsica almost got me locked up for the night!

The idea was coming home to me that who you could be and how you could be were not absolutes, but depended closely on linguistic and cultural factors. Not that I was conscious of it in that way at the time, or indeed for a long time to come. An example of my failing to grasp the issues was the way I ordered my beer in Spanish bars in my early twenties. Even though I had been living in Spain for quite some time, and spoke Spanish fluently, I found I was still trying to convince myself that the person who had arrived after me and was shouting his order at an already harried bartender must be a friend. Otherwise, how could he presume to ask for his beer in that way? It took me ages to realise that not all these people could be friends, and that the reason I was taking three or four times as long as other people to get served was because I was waiting for the bartender to complete the previous order and signal that it was now my turn, the way English bar staff do. I had the language ability, but I was suffering from a cultural blind spot. Once I got over it, I quite enjoyed bartenders doing a double take when I shouted my order out over people's heads, sometimes even saying to me, 'Oh, sorry. I thought you were a foreigner!'

In fact, it would be hard to find any one who looks less Spanish than I do. Yet, while my fluency in Spanish was not enough in itself to override the impression of my physical appearance, once I added to that the ability to throw myself psychologically into a Spanish persona (which was what my new-found way of asking for a beer amounted to) people would often be convinced, at least momentarily.

This Spanish persona of mine did a lot more than just order beer. When, in a small town in the south of Spain, I found that my landlord, whose rent was overdue, had simply gone to my bank and got the teller to subtract the money from my account, I gave the unfortunate teller a dressing down that made the episode at Ajaccio airport look like a picnic, and stormed past my landlord in the street, cutting short his greeting with a haughty toss of the head! And I devised all kinds of retorts and put-downs for strangers staring at me in the street (two of my favourites were, 'Go home and watch television, instead of standing in the street like a fool, staring at passers-by!' and, 'You only get the first three minutes free; if you want to keep on staring after that you have to pay!').

It is almost impossible to imagine behaving in such a way here in Japan. For a start, people (apart from children) don't stare. They studiously don't stare. They don't stare to such an extent that you sometimes wonder if you have become invisible! They certainly don't nudge each other and giggle with their hands over their mouths, making comments on your dress or the way you walk, like they do in Andalusia. Here, if people don't like you (or what you stand for in their minds), they don't insult you or confront you, they just ignore you. So a bagful of snappy retorts is less of an asset. Even when the occasional unguarded comment has dropped from the mouth of, say, a drunken businessman unwinding in some bar, I have found that dry irony works far better than letting rip as I might have done in Spain.

'Uh! A foreigner?!' one man says in disbelief, seeing me in the bar, adding, more to his friend than to me, 'I hate foreigners.'

'I'm terribly sorry for being a foreigner,' I reply politely, bowing as I speak. 'It really is unforgivable of me.'

In Japan, the person who loses his cool is as much in the wrong, if not more so, than the person who has caused the original offence. Even if the irony is lost on its intended victim, one has gained respect in the estimation of bystanders. The interesting thing is that when I was last in Spain I found that I was now importing this Japanese cultural value into my dealings with Spanish people, and finding not only that it better suited my years (ire is all very well in one's youth, but at the age of 46 dignity seems more becoming!) but also that it was quite successful in its way. I now know that maintaining a polite front can also work in Andalusia, whereas before I'd have said a sharp tongue and a ready wit were the main tools for getting along in that society.

It is not, then, simply a question of moulding myself to the values of the culture I am in, but of those values actually forming me into something that works in different cultural situations. Looking at the baggage of 'who I am', I might say, for example, that France first liberated me from some of my English inhibitions about physical contact with other people and Spain helped me to channel my anger into a form of self-assertion (those put-downs and quips were not infrequently the starting point for friendships, once I had learned to deliver them without rancour), whereas Japan brings out a more meditative and restrained side of me.

So language is closely bound up with identity, though not perhaps in the way my mother felt it to be when I was a boy. I still feel there is not much point saying 'barth' when I am talking to people to whom that sounds intrinsically ridiculous. I adapt my Spanish depending on the listener and the region (using 'th' in the north of Spain and 's' in the south, for example, in words like cinco), so why not do the same in English? If the result is that people have difficulty pinning me down to any social class or region, that suits me fine. I'd just as soon not have those kinds of a priori identities foisted on me.

In some ways, then, language identifies me in much the same way as clothes do. Just as wearing 'casuals' is likely to make a person be casual, and starched shirts will tend to do the opposite, so the language I use can get under my skin and actually produce changes in me. And language, like clothes, contains messages we can consciously change and manipulate about who or what we feel we are. Unlike many people, perhaps, I personally find clothes more restricting than language in this respect. Once you have presented yourself to the world in a certain dress you can't very easily back down or modify it (apart from perhaps stuffing a superfluous tie into a pocket, or something). You have to go back home and change. With language, however, you can shift your register subtly and redefine yourself for other people as you are talking to them. One thing we can never really do, though, is undress ourselves linguistically. Without clothes, we stand revealed in our nakedness, but without language we are nothing at all.