A former student of mine once asked me whether it was possible to truly speak a foreign language with a ‘native’ accent. This student – let’s call her Emma – had initially come to me for French classes after not having studied the language since secondary school. Emma had reached that all-too-familiar feeling of defeat that often comes with learning a foreign language: ‘Will I ever sound like a native speaker?’
A British newspaper called The Economist published an article on why we have an accent in a foreign language. It identifies how areas such as phonetics, phonotactics (the different combinations of sound units in a language) and rhythm are rarely taught in languages and how this can lead to students using their own language as a reference for pronunciation in the foreign language. The short answer to Emma’s question then is yes, you can learn how to speak ‘like a native’ if you’re taught linguistics and make an effort to imitate native speakers.
However, the focus of this discussion is not how to gain a ‘native’ accent in a foreign language, but to question why learners tend to concentrate on this. I refer to the idea of being a native speaker in inverted commas to highlight it as a term which is frequently used but requires deconstructing and perhaps reforming. Because what is a native accent? Who counts as a native speaker? And why do we want to sound like them, anyway?
Like many people, I grew up believing I didn’t have an accent. It was everyone else who had an accent. I come from a typical family household in the south of England and whilst it’s true that my accent is relatively neutral as far as British accents go, it is nonetheless an accent.
When I was 17, I moved to Northern Ireland where I discovered a very different British dialect known as Ulster English. Everything was ‘wee’ and ‘grand’; I could hear the letter ‘r’ at the end of words; and the people had the most curious way of enunciating their vowels (ask a Northern Irish person to say ‘how now brown cow’). Not to mention all the new words and phrases – some of which didn’t make grammatical sense to me. For the first time in my life, I felt conscious of having an accent. I was certainly never posh, but suddenly my vowels sounded exaggerated and my t’s excessively articulated. What’s more, I was frequently the source of light-hearted ridicule for my southern English diction as well as my baffled face when I didn’t understand someone.
It’s been over ten years since I moved to Northern Ireland and though I often find myself using the inclusive ‘we’ when talking about the Northern Irish people, I’m still occasionally referred to as ‘the wee English girl’. And yet my family would say I now have ‘a little Irish accent’. Overtime, I developed a hybrid dialect and, with that, a minor identity crisis. I no longer felt I fully belonged anywhere because everywhere I went, I was told I sounded different to the rest.
Perhaps part of my endeavour to master the Spanish accent stemmed from my anxiety to belong somewhere. As most language learners discover, what we’re taught in the classroom is not how people speak in the real world. I arrived in Asturias, Spain, fresh faced and full of hope… only to be quickly labelled a ‘guiri’ (the European Spanish version of ‘gringo’). Hyper-aware of my foreigner status, I was desperate to blend in, but to do so I needed to sound like the locals. And if I sounded like the locals, then that would mean I had mastered the language, right?
The notion that having a native speaker’s accent is equivalent to fluency has been disproven to me on a number of occasions. I remember once meeting a young woman from Tijuana, Mexico, who had an uncanny ability to read aloud in English with a standard American accent, despite not knowing how to speak English. Tijuana is found right at the border between Mexico and the United States, and my new acquaintance had naturally developed an ear for the American English pronunciation from her environment. In this case, her ability to imitate the American accent was not at all reflective of her ability to speak English.
I went back to Spain for round two over a year later, this time located in Galicia. Despite being Asturias’ neighbour, Galician people have a different – and rather catchy – accent. It wasn’t until some time later when I met up with a Catalan friend who giggled at my accent that I realised I had picked up the canorous Galician lilt. In some ways I had achieved my goal: I had (one version of) a Spanish accent. And yet if I left the Galician autonomous community, I would once again have a different accent to everyone else. I found myself in a similar identity complex as to when I moved to Northern Ireland.
With time I learnt that it was my own anxiety which made me feel like an outsider, more so than my accent identifying me as such. As someone who enjoys travelling, I learned to make peace with the fact that I will have an accent wherever I go, whatever language I speak. Indeed, it is the patchwork of inflections and cadences in our voices which both make up our unique identity and tell a story of where we’re from.
Since coming to Colombia, the discussion around accents has come up on numerous occasions and it’s largely why I chose to write about this. Most, if not all, Colombians I’ve spoken to have been surprised and amused in equal measure that I have a European Spanish accent (‘Entonces, usted es inglesa, … ¿pero con acento español?’). If all the previous times my accent had been commented on weren’t enough, it was now clear to me that the concept of becoming a ‘native’ speaker is really just a myth. Accents, dialects and languages are only considered native among a certain group of people; moreover, they’re loaded with cultural traditions and references that can’t always be fully appreciated as someone who hasn’t grown up with them. To what extent then can we truly say we have a native accent?
As an English Language Assistant at the Universidad Surcolombiana, I work with English-Language Learners on a regular basis. What’s struck me most about their attitude towards English is their desire to speak English ‘like a native’ – but what is that exactly? The answer is usually someone with an American or British accent, but which one? The textbook received pronunciation (also known as the King’s English)? The Glaswegian accent, notorious for being difficult to understand? My hybrid accent? (For those wanting a few more suggestions, British comedian Siobhan Thompson offers an excellent representation of the various accents in the UK.) And then what about all of the other countries which speak English as a first or second language? New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago, Singapore, Malta, Puerto Rico, South Africa, or the Philippines, to name but a few. Why are the accents from those countries never used as a reference point?
There’s certainly a bigger discussion to be had on linguistic imperialism and discrimination. Personally, I find it strange to be admired for something I didn’t learn or work hard for. I speak this way purely because of where I was born and my life circumstances. If white language supremacy and accent bias can explain why my accent is idolised, then equally it is our role as language teachers to deconstruct these ideologies with students to pave the way for a fairer teaching model that better represents the use of English (and other languages) spoken around the world.
To return to Emma’s question, the focus shouldn’t be on how ‘native’ we sound. Your accent is your identity and the way you speak tells, in itself, a unique story of who you are, where you’re from and where you’ve been. In language exams we’re often assessed on our ability to speak with one specific accent, even if native English speakers like myself have more than one colour in our accents. Whilst such formats provide us with a practical model for teaching English, it’s important to remember how diverse the English language is. What matters more is that, wherever you go, you can find a way to be understood and that you have the confidence in the first place to go to those places and speak.
Out of the Shell 