Accent, dialect, or disorder?

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 8^th March 2014.

Expats and immigrants

Have you ever wondered why those of us who move to work in a different country are sometimes called expats and sometimes immigrants? The labels can’t reflect distinct purposes behind the move, because both groups leave previous stomping grounds to seek (perceived) better conditions elsewhere. So I thought of trying to understand the reason for the choice of different labels.

We could start with standard dictionary definitions. Expat(riate): ‘one who lives outside their native country’. Immigrant: ‘one who comes to live permanently in a foreign country’. I wonder why these definitions can’t be swapped, in that neither expats nor immigrants live in their “native” country – or both are “foreigners” in their new country, if we prefer. The word “permanently” appears to hint at a difference, portraying immigrants as having moved for good, whether intentionally or not. I also wonder. Many immigrants leave their country not because they’ve ruled out returning to it, but because the only way to return to it and survive in it involves spending time elsewhere creating the means to do so. On the other hand, if expats count as temporary visitors, I go on wondering what to make of families like mine (we rank as expats, not immigrants), who’ve stayed put in the same country for decades as permanent residents. How permanent is “permanent”?

We could try integration into the host community. Maybe not a good differentiator, on second thought, in that my thesaurus gives ‘alien’ and ‘outsider’ as head synonyms of “foreigner”. Whether quartered in dedicated compounds or roughing it out there in the mainstream jungle, neither expats nor immigrants are renowned for assimilation skills. Perhaps because we all tend to build our home even, or perhaps especially, when away from home? I, for one, don’t see any difference between these two scenarios where I happened to play the role of confidante, the immigrant lady fussing about (substandard) standards of personal hygiene in her new country, and the expat lady who was devastated by her realisation that her favourite (home) brand of coffee wasn’t available where she had moved to.

Could a differential (or do I mean deferential?) guest status in a host nation be it? The word expat does carry nicer connotations than the word immigrant, but connotations have nothing to do with what we are: whatever the labels we go by when we’re working in a new country, we’re aliens. We represent a nation within someone else’s nation, a foreign body in someone else’s eye. Even when we are officially recognised as citizens of more than one country, like my Swedoguese children, that citizenship is always hyphenated and therefore always “special”. Vaidehi Ramanathan’s book Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship explains the art of using citizenship as a weapon and/or shield, as needed. It is as if the countries ruled over us, people. So no difference there, either.

And then it hit me. The difference must lie in our entitlement to the languages we brought along with us in the move. Expat children attend schools featuring their home language. More often than not, these “international” schools offer monolingual schooling, which means that it’s fine for little expats to stick to remaining monolingual, if they so are and they so wish. Immigrant children attend schools featuring the mainstream language. More often than not, these local schools also offer monolingual schooling, which means that little immigrants must, in principle, become multilingual. I say in principle, because what happens in practice, more often than not, is that little immigrants find themselves discouraged to stick to any other language than the mainstream one.

There might be a few blurry edges here, though. Like immigrant families, multilingual expat families may also need to actively assert their right to keep their languages in good working order, as I report in my book Three is a Crowd?. Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl and Olivier Moliner put it this way, in their book Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History: because of “the principle of ‘one language, one state, one people’ [...], multilingualism came to be viewed as an undesirable aberration.”

So how do our linguistic “aberrations” further impact the way we are treated, in more than one sense of this word? I’ll look at this next time.

© MCF 2014

Next post: Accent, dialect, or disorder? Saturday 8^th February 2014.

Multilingual crosswords

I found out only the other day that 2013 marks the first centenary of crossword puzzles. I was rather surprised, actually, because I realised I had been under the impression that such marvellous entertainment must have been invented as soon as words themselves were. For some reason, my mind had dated crosswords all the way back to the invention of playing cards, which we (apparently) owe to Imperial China. In any case, I wouldn’t forgive myself for missing out on the celebration before the year is out.

Image © MCF

Quite a long time ago, I woke up in one of those multilingual moods which, as inexplicably, came associated with crosswords and with my children. The children were familiar with crosswords because of my addiction to them, and they also knew that crossword puzzling comes in many variants, like any other culture-bound entertainment. Swedish-style crosswords, for example, feature a picture, a mix of quick and cryptic clues which are included in the grid itself where other variants may have blocked cells, and strings of light-shaded cells for answers which have no explicit clue except some relationship to the given picture. Whatever their style, however, crossword puzzles all have one thing in common: they stimulate thinking about words in different ways, thereby engaging our linguistic little grey cells in different ways. Since I’ve spent most of my life enjoying linguistic fun and thinking about it, my odd mood on that day gave me the perfect excuse to try to spread the crossword virus to my little ones.

Swedish and English were the languages in which the children were literate at the time, so I created a grid containing Swedish-English orthographic twins with possible different meanings in each language (e.g. the word pass) and two sets of clues, one in each language. My clues were of the quick kind (I’m a coward, yes...), asking for names of people/characters, things, places, activities, synonyms, fill-in-the-blank and anything else I could think of which related to the children’s everyday interests. It was up to the children to decide whether they wanted to solve the crossword twice, separately in each language, or once, using both sets of clues at the same time. Needless to say, the grid had quite a lot of blocked cells, nothing in the way of symmetry, and was otherwise not very appealing to the eye. I used a typical Portuguese grid design, by the way, where rows and columns are numbered sequentially at the side/top of the grid, and individual clues for each of the answers in the same row or column are separated by punctuation marks. This was the least I could do to have some Portugueseness included in the puzzle.

Physical and mental activities spawned by this crossword puzzle had an unexpected side effect among the children. They all suffered a brief but all the more intense relapse of their (very) aggravating child humour bouts of years before, when they used to point at, say, dogs, then call them cats, then giggle their socks off at their joke, and then repeat the whole routine with (very) minor variations over and over again while prodding us parents to join in. They now spent time and energy inserting, say, Swedish crossword words in English utterances or vice versa, and likewise ROFLing at the results. Given that nurturing their awareness of words and word play in their languages was one of the purposes I had in mind when I set the puzzle, I suppose I shouldn’t complain about having kindled the associated silliness, too.

On the whole, then, I rate the effects of this word-venture quite positively. Crosswords develop our skills in thinking about a language in that language. They teach us new words and help us sort out old and new word spellings. In addition, many of us aren’t necessarily aware of lexical or other relationships among our different languages. Our languages are there to serve different purposes, so their everyday use seldom affords us opportunities to track any similarities they may share. But knowing about them can come in handy: two of my children had to study Latin in school (I know. Don’t ask: just have a look here), which they did in English, their school language. They had serious trouble memorising (ditto: here) all those “funny” words and their meanings until I pointed out to them that thinking about Latin words in Latin’s daughter Portuguese might assist otherwise puzzling homework tasks. This was a true epiphany for the children. Multilinguals do not develop this kind of cross-linguistic awareness spontaneously, by simply being multilingual, despite common assumptions to the contrary – an issue I’ll come back to some other day.

Not least, the multilingual crossword was sheer fun to set and solve. If you’re into language brain-teasers and language play, and would like to see how we can solve and appreciate them even in languages that we’ve never seen or heard before, you may enjoy my Lang101 Workbook. It includes puzzles in languages which use non-Roman scripts, though I have no idea whether or how multilingual print-based puzzles combining different scripts might work. I would be delighted to hear about this.

My next post has a couple of thoughts about what else we can do with our languages.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Expats and immigrants. Saturday 11^th January 2014.

You must be joking.

When we tell someone that they must be joking we don’t mean that they must be joking: we mean we don’t believe what they’re saying. They may not be lying, but what they’re saying strikes us as making sense only in the realm of make-believe. We say this in a tone of voice that rules out acknowledgement of shared merriment. And we don’t laugh at the presumed “joke”. So why the word joking, then? Quirks of linguistic formulaic devices, surely, but that’s what languages are: formulaic devices. We need to learn when and how telling people that they must be joking is appropriate, because we don’t say this to people whom we know are joking. So how do we know they’re not?

At the turn of last century, in a monograph titled Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique which has withstood the test of time, Henri Bergson argued that what makes us laugh, “le comique, [c’est] du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant”. Stumbles and/or falls, for example, trigger our mirth because (more or less) supple living bodies fall prey to mechanical stiffness – and I suspect there must be something mechanical at work, too, in what makes us laugh over and over again at whatever makes us laugh. Perhaps the converse of Bergson’s take, plating life onto machines, is one reason why machines aren’t that good at laughing at what makes us laugh? Or rather, why we aren’t that good at creating laughter-inducing software. Richard Powers puts it this way, in Galatea 2.2: Helen, the mechanical protagonist, “was strange. [...] She sped laugh-free through Green Eggs and Ham”. Helen isn’t the only one having issues with laughter in this novel, by the way: if you’re curious, have a look in Fran McDonald’s chapter Wrong laughter: Laughing away the human in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2.

Bergson also explained why laughter confirms a successfully shared joke: “Notre rire est toujours le rire d’un groupe.” 

Image: isCute.com

As we learn our languages, whether we’re young or old, we learn what’s shared through them among fellow-users. Human beings are natural merrymakers, regardless of culture, so it’s no wonder that one of the main purposes of language use is entertaining, along with informing and persuading. Since jokes make sense to insiders, learning to make and get jokes isn’t as frivolous as it may appear on first thought. Happily, given the not-for-laughs nature of most language teaching materials, humour is being increasingly understood as a very effective language learning tool. Research by Nancy Bell shows, for example, that fostering joking in a new language enhances linguistic proficiency, by promoting creative ways of using those new linguistic resources. Catherine Davies provides an additional reason for getting to grips with humour in the language classroom: her study How English-learners joke with native speakers concludes that “Such fine-tuning of understanding is the core of why the ability to participate in such joking is important in the development of rapport.” Not only do we learn better what makes us laugh, learning what makes others laugh hails us as sanctioned linguistic insiders. My take is that people who joke together wire together.

Although I have yet to decide which of the two is more vexing, someone telling you that you must be joking when you are joking, or someone laughing at your joke when you’re not, I’m sure of one thing: prosody is often to blame for mishaps of this kind, as research included in this special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition, dedicated to Prosody and Humour, makes clear. We draw on language/culture-specific analogies and metaphors, bodily ones included, to create idiomatic sarcasm and irony, but language/culture-specific prosody is what allows their interpretation as humorous. Maybe the reason why Richard Powers’ Helen and our other human-like machines don’t know how to laugh is that programmers inherited the traditional view of languages as exhausting themselves in robot-friendly words + grammar. Just a thought.

Lastly, a healthy note: we know about an apple a day, but a laugh a day may have equally beneficial effects on our physiology and psychology. Here are two, for the child within each and every one of us: Howard L. Chace’s monolingual fairy tale, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut and Luis d’Antin van Rooten’s multilingual rhymes Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames. I’ll indulge in some more language play next time.

Davies, C. (2003). How English-learners joke with native speakers: an interactional sociolinguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures Journal of Pragmatics, 35 (9), 1361-1385 DOI: 10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00181-9

Goldstein, J. (1982). A Laugh A Day The Sciences, 22 (6), 21-25 DOI: 10.1002/j.2326-1951.1982.tb02088.x

McDonald, F. (2012). Wrong laughter: Laughing away the human in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2. In Matos Alves, A. (ed.), Unveiling the Posthuman, Interdisciplinary Press.

© MCF 2013

Next post: Multilingual crosswords. Saturday 14^th December 2013.

Multilingual liars

Cynics have it that human beings developed language in order to be able to lie. I’m not sure I like the innuendo in this suggestion, but I’m quite sure that language does allow us to lie and that we human beings make liberal use of this linguistic facility.

Human language features what linguists call displacement, enabling us to talk about absent and/or fictitious referents – you can read more about this in Chapters 1 and 12 of my book The Language of Language. Robert Wright, in The Moral Animal, discusses the morals of lying, a fascinating topic in itself – and I quite like another cynic’s take on morality in general, August Strindberg’s in Röda Rummet: “... moralen som de bestå, det är deras elakhet som anlagt en lämplig, presentabel form”. But Wright also argues that our ability to empathise with fellow human beings’ feelings and thoughts explains our deception skills. He writes that “the presentation of self, and the perception of others, has great Darwinian consequence: reciprocal altruism and social hierarchy”, which, by an apparent paradox, “may together be responsible for most of the dishonesty in our species” (emphasis mine). And he adds: “We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest, if only because we do the most talking” (emphasis his, p. 265).

Like empathy, displacement was once hailed as a distinctive characteristic of human languages, but we’re not so sure any longer. The issue revolves not only around what we mean by language(s) (the perennial issue of terminology...), but principally around what we’ve come to learn about non-human communication. Birds can fake injury, in order to attract a predator’s attention away from their nests. Natural camouflage experts likewise deceive their predators, and carnivorous plants their prey. We’ve also long known that bluffing about resourcefulness is a survival strategy among those of us who populate lower rungs of the food chain. For example, Eldridge S. Adams and Michael Mesterton-Gibbons, in The cost of threat displays and the stability of deceptive communication, reported on one crustacean species whose weaker members resort to threatening behaviour as much as their strong ones, with the same goal of putting off stronger opponents.

Social chains are our civilised equivalent of food chains, and we often lie for similar purposes of survival. Why else do we praise the quality of substandard meals, useless meetings or soporific lectures to which we’ve been invited, for example? We may not be intentionally attempting to deceive by doing so, not least because feedback of this kind is largely formulaic, but we are certainly attempting to benefit from using language in less than honest ways. We even have dedicated names to represent our gradient views about the moral acceptability of untruthfulness, from white lies and fibs through hoaxes to frauds and swindles. Strindberg did indeed hit the nail on the head.

Lying, like any other social behaviour, obeys culturally sanctioned norms. It engages not only our linguistic resources but (mostly?) body language, hand movements, eye gestures, facial expressions, whose interplay we must learn to adjust congruently in order to become competent liars. When we lie, we don’t want it to show.

Image © Enrico Mazzanti (Wikimedia Commons)

Over 20 years ago, in Fishy-looking liars: Deception judgment from expectancy violation, Charles F. Bond and colleagues investigated the effects of discrepant verbal vs. nonverbal clues in our perception of deception. More recently, Joanne Arciuli’s co-authored study “Um, I can tell you’re lying”: Linguistic markers of deception versus truth-telling in speech found that hesitation markers, sometimes misunderstood as signs of disfluency, play a core role in our perception of fluent truth-telling vs. lying.

So what about those of us who need to lie in tongues? The issue of whether we can identify liars across languages and cultures appears to be far from settled, judging by research led by Charles F. Bond which shows both that cross-linguistic and cross-cultural lying behaviour can’t be detected (e.g. in Lie detection across cultures) and that it can (e.g. in International deception).

These findings may explain why the behaviour of multilinguals at times rings false, as it were. This is particularly true of trainee multilinguals such as young children and beginner language learners: it takes time to gain awareness of conventional behaviours in different languages, in different places, to different people, and it takes effort to master their appropriateness. In addition, it’s not enough to just remember the lies that we concoct, so we can stick to them, we also need to remember in which language we lied. Professional liars (spies come to mind, though I’m sure they’re in good company), know all about this: they must develop skills which not only uphold the credibility of their false persona and false claims but, chiefly, suppress the clues which would betray their true persona’s lying habits.

Next time, I’ll deal with something that relates, indirectly, to perceptions of lying. Meanwhile, let me leave you with nothing but the truth, my favourite example of the Liar’s Paradox: Don’t believe a word I say. I’m a liar.

Adams, E., & Mesterton-Gibbons, M. (1995). The cost of threat displays and the stability of deceptive communication. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 175 (4), 405-421 DOI: 10.1006/jtbi.1995.0151

ARCIULI, J., MALLARD, D., & VILLAR, G. (2010). “Um, I can tell you're lying”: Linguistic markers of deception versus truth-telling in speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31 (03), 397-411 DOI: 10.1017/S0142716410000044

Bond, C., Omar, A., Mahmoud, A., & Bonser, R. (1990). Lie detection across cultures. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 14 (3), 189-204 DOI: 10.1007/BF00996226

Bond, C., Omar, A., Pitre, U., Lashley, B., Skaggs, L., & Kirk, C. (1992). Fishy-looking liars: Deception judgment from expectancy violation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63 (6), 969-977 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.63.6.969

Bond, C., & Atoum, A. (2000). International Deception. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26 (3), 385-395 DOI: 10.1177/0146167200265010


© MCF 2013

Next post: You must be joking. Saturday 30^th November 2013.