When is a feature of speech
a feature of speech and when does it signal possible speech-language
impairment? It may not always be easy to tell whether our linguistic
habits reveal something worrying about us or just something about us.
The term accent(s) describes the
way we sound (or the way we sign),
as part of the dialect(s) that we use. The trouble begins
right here, in that these two terms are often confused and/or
misused. (In case you’re suspecting that I will, yet again, rant
about one of my pet peeves, wholesale lay and professional use of
obscure terminology,
I’m afraid you’re right. I do suffer from a fixation with our
fixation with labels whose relevance to what we’re using them for
either doesn’t exist or we don’t understand.)
The trouble is compounded by the
widespread use of accent and dialect as judgemental
labels,
not descriptive ones. Saying that someone speaks with an accent or
that someone speaks dialect carries the assumption that there are
ways of speaking with no accent
or no dialectal features.
We all speak dialect, because we all speak language varieties, not
“languages”,
and dialect is shorthand for ‘language variety’. Dialects
come complete with characteristic vocabulary and grammar. Whole
monographs have been dedicated to dialectal variation of what we call
“languages”, one example being Benedikt Szmrecsanyi’s study of
a restricted sample of what we call “English”, Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects.
Dialects also come complete with accents, their characteristic
patterns of vowels, consonants and prosody, which means that we all
speak with an accent, too.
The issue is that the standard
accents we’ve learned to associate with prestige varieties
of language do not necessarily match the accent standards that we use
in our everyday lives. Our accents reflect our social networks,
because accents don’t exist without people,
but also our bodies, because people don’t exist without
bodies: we all speak through our own vocal tract, not somebody else’s
– something I’ll come back to some other day.
So how do we tell idiosyncratic uses of
language from disordered uses? Take lisping, for example. It is taken
as a speech defect when it concerns replacement of other sounds,
usually sibilants like /s/. But lisping in itself can’t be a
“defect”, in that lisped articulations are part of standard
dialects of, say, English (in words like think) and Spanish
(in words like hacer), and are in fact recommended as a
desirable goal in acquiring “good” accents
in those languages. Or take saying [w] where /l/ might otherwise be
expected, as when some of us enjoy owd friends, pick fwowers, and
don’t wike to be iw. This is typical of child speech and is thus
associated with “incomplete” learning. Incidentally, standard
speech-language clinical terminology calls these child manipulations
of speech sounds errors, a word commonly equated with ‘wrong’.
Child pronunciations such as these aren’t wrong: they need no
correction, because they’re developmental.
In adult speech, saying [w] for /l/ may require specialist attention
if it impairs intewigibiwity – or dents the user’s sewf-esteem.
We can also use [w] for /l/ only in specific phonological contexts,
that is, specific places within a word/phrase, in which case we enjoy
owd friends, pick flowers, and don’t like to be iw. This is the
rule in many Brazilian dialects of Portuguese, for example, one
instance being the word Brasil itself.
There may, in sum, be nothing “wrong”
with the way we pronounce our languages. One thing is an observed
feature of speech, quite another is what we’ve been conditioned to
think about it.
There’s a world of difference between clinical and social
evaluation of pronunciations. In addition, monolingual standards
concerning specific dialects of a restricted number of languages have
dominated the creation and implementation of speech-language
assessment tools. Countless studies over countless years have
insisted on “differences” between monolingual and multilingual
uses of language,
as if differences were unexpected, all the while portraying
monolingualism as benchmark, as if multilingualism were exceptional.
Against which “normal” are we assessing multilinguals, really?
There’s a world of difference between typical multilingualism and disordered multilingualism.
Healthy speech does not mean
standard
speech and does not mean monolingual(-like) speech. If we keep using Cinderella’s slippers
to serve everyone’s feet, no wonder we end up saying everyone else
is an Ugly Sister.
 |
| © Anne Anderson (1874-1930) – Wikimedia Commons |
Next time, I’ll try to explain why
the sisters aren’t ugly at all.
© MCF 2014
Next post:
Learning languages – what for? Saturday 8th
March 2014.
