Musings on confusings...

Since I first learned I had got the job in Sicily, my Spanish has suffered. The day after the job interview, I was at a Spanish/English language exchange, and I kept dropping words of Italian into my Spanish. The weird thing is that my Spanish was a million times stronger than my Italian then, but somehow my brain had switched "mode".

Obviously, living in Italy for four months has only served to intensify this, with my Spanish now being half-hidden behind fairly broken bits of Italian. My assumption for a long time was that my problem was in my accent -- I still speak Italian with a bit of a Spanish twang. This belief was bolstered by the fact that my Catalan, while being very, very weak from lack of use, didn't seem so badly affected. The Catalan accent is very, very different from Spanish and Italian.

However, I was at a Couchsurfing meeting on Friday night which changed my mind. There was an Andalusian tourist visiting, and when I spoke to her, my accent was more different from the one I use in Italian than I had expected. My brain started playing tricks on me, and I had difficulty speaking Italian when she was in my line-of-sight, and for a while I was wobbling between Italian and Spanish.

But that's not the important thing.

When I was speaking Italian, I got into much deeper and more complex conversations than I normally would, and rather than jamming up as I hit the limits of my Italian, I was automatically switching to Spanish to fill in the gaps. Now, I wasn't just importing words or grammar rules from Spanish into Italian -- no, I was switching into Spanish; conjugations, pronouns and all. As I became aware I was doing this, it dawned on me that I'd been doing it for my whole stay, but normally I'd just not thought about it too much and fallen back to English.

This is a bit of a new sensation... or actually, no. The only new thing is the fact that I was unaware of it. When it was Scottish Gaelic and French, for example, it would be instantly noticeable. The difference here is that the similarity of the languages (including, but not limited to, accent) allowed it to slip through the net on occasions.

The trigger mechanism is the same, regardless of language: hit a gap in your knowledge in one language and the brain will fall back on another. The only difference lies in detection.

This makes me wonder if the only option I have now to get my Spanish back is... to learn more Italian. My theory is that filling in the main gaps in my Italian will not only stop me falling back on Spanish when I run out of Italian, but that as a consequence of this, it will reduce the strength of the linkage between the two, allowing me to speak Spanish without Italian interrupting me.

It looks like I might be practising my Italian a lot, even once I leave Italy...

I've always been a bit concerned about learning other people's mistakes, but this never fully explained why I always feel a bit funny about talking to other learners.

Well, I think I've worked it out.

Last night, I was listening to a German woman talking Italian, and because I didn't have the Italian accent as a cue (she has a strong German accent), my brain didn't switch into Italian mode properly, and it felt like I was listening to Spanish-with-errors instead.

Interesting.

The importance and unimportance of accent

Accent is essentially unimportant.  It's the final coat of paint that makes our language pretty or ugly, shiny or dull.  It is something that the beginning learner really doesn't need to think about.

Unfortunately, this is something that is frequently overinterpreted, because many people don't appreciate the fact that accent is only one part of pronunciation.

Every language has it's own phonology -- it has a set of possible sounds and possible combinations of sounds, and it has a set of distinctions between sounds.  Though we do not need to learn a good accent from day one, we certainly need to learn the sound system of a language.

The most common consequence of conflating the sound system with accent is the idea that the "closest sound" from your native language is "good enough".  Open up almost any beginner's book and it'll start with a list of sounds described along the lines of "like the a in cat", "like t in English".  But this is rarely true.

Still, some languages will let you get away with this to some extent, but when you hit a more complicated language, it all crumbles.

Any book on Hindi will tell you that "closest sounds" just won't cut it, and that with that approach you will never be understood.  This is because Hindi has more sounds than most other languages.  In fact, there are 8 sounds that are approximately similar to T and D, so using an English T and D, or a French one, or a German one, would leave you completely unable to distinguish certain words, and unable to make yourself understood.

Worse, because you treat 4 different sounds as one, you will never learn to hear the difference either -- your brain only distinguishes sounds that mean something.  The later you attempt to fix it, the harder it will be, because you will have to relearn all the vocabulary in order to learn the difference.

I've experienced this personally with Spanish.  In Spanish C is pronounced like Z, when the C is followed by I or E.  In some areas, these in turn sound like S, but in other areas, they don't.  I started learning Spanish from a course that didn't make a distinction between S and Z, but as I progressed I spent more of my time with people who make the distinction than those who don't.

As a result, I started trying to speak like them.  However, my brain was trained to see the two things as one, so I was prone to making mistakes such as pronouncing the word "especial" as "ezpesial".  My errors were arbitrary, but not random -- they were consistent and there was a clear pattern.  My brain was still seeing the two as equivalent, but was trying to explain it in terms of the other sounds in the word.   Thankfully this was still pretty early, so I caught it and fixed it.

Other people are not so lucky.  A local French teacher (from France) can pronounce all the sounds of English.  But he couldn't before he came here.  The result is that he has already learned all the words with the wrong sounds.  The classic example is TH -- it's always T or D when he speaks.  He's learnt the words now, so there's no going back.

Now, that's something that we call "falling together" (ah, a nice, self-descriptive term for once), but phonemes can also split apart.

Consider that Japanese doesn't make a distinction between liquids L and R.  As an English speaker learning Japanese, I would likely hear these as different phonemes (meaningful units of sounds) instead of simply different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme ("allophones").

This splitting apart on its own isn't a big problem -- it doesn't lose information the same way falling together does.  However, the two can very easily co-occur,  and at that point they make a bad situation worse.

Take for example "CH" in German.  It has two allophones -- a hard one (ach) similar to the sound in Scottish "loch", and a softer palatised one (ich) that takes on a quality similar to the English SH.  But there's another phoneme that sounds even more like the English SH, one that's usually written SCH.  And it gets worse, because in certain combinations of consonants, S starts to sound the same.
If we're not careful, the learner may end up splitting their Ss and their CHs, and putting half of each in the same box as SCH.  The result is a map of the sound system which looks nothing like the native speakers view of things.

Accent is what we put on top of the sound system to give it colour and personality.  You cannot develop a good accent based on an incorrect map of the sound system.  Pronunciation has to be taught from the start in such a way as to encourage a consistent and correct sound system.

Accent can wait until later, but pronunciation must taught in some form right from the start.

The question of identity and language.

One of my New Year's resolutions was to get away from a particular language forum.  I've been spending too much time arguing various things there, and sometimes I do make a bit of a fool of myself.  So I'm off for a bit to cool off, although I'll be popping back in for a couple of particular topics only.

Anyhow, I thought I'd take the opportunity to firm up my thoughts on a particular topic that we'd been discussing in December - the importance of accent to the learner.

The first angle I'd like to cover this from is the idea that your accent is part of your identity, the "face" of your voice, as it were.

Accent: your voice's face?

OK, so as I said, many people see their accent as a major outward component of their identity.  Personally, I cannot accept that, as it would basically make me two faced.  When I was a child, I spoke with a Scots accent (in fact, I spoke a language that was neither Scots or English, but a little of both), but I learned through the education system to speak with a more SSE (Scottish English) accent.  Eventually, through university friends and work, I adjusted myself to an even more Englicised[*] way of speaking.  Now my accent, grammar and vocabulary all vary across this spectrum depending on who I'm speaking to.

( [*] Yes, I made up this word.  However, "anglicised" doesn't cut it in this situation as Scots and English are both Anglo-Saxon tongues.  Only one of them is from "England", though. )

Does this make me an attention-whore?  Not really.  This is a completely natural part of language, and we all do it to an extent.  Linguists call it convergence.  The idea is that when we want to show social closeness to others, we talk in a way more like them.  On the other hand, if we want to show social distance, we talk less like them.

Studying this concept several years ago led me to an interesting philosophical standpoint:

True identity is relative.

On first reading, that may seem a little insane, so let me explain.

Consider the difference in social etiquette in Spain and Scotland.
In Scotland, when you're introduced to someone, you'll probably give them a little wave, or if you're very bold, you might go as far as a timid handshake.  Only on very rare occasions will you kiss or hug them - maybe they're a brother's fiancée or something.  In Spain, on the other hand, guys will immediately go for a firm handshake if they're in range, and a guy and a girl or two girls will almost invariably kiss.

If you define "reservedness" as part of a "Scottish identity" and "forwardness" as part of a "Spanish identity", then you are suggesting that a guy from the UK who goes to Spain and starts merrily kissing the chicas has lost his identity, but I don't feel this is the case.

When I'm in Spanish company, I tend to act the same way as they do, but I don't feel that my identity is threatened.  In fact, I feel that I am projecting the same self-image as I do when surrounded by my friends in Edinburgh.

If I was to continue to act in a "Scottish" way while with Spanish people, I would seem completely antisocial, but that's not my identity.  In order to seem equally sociable in Spanish-speaking company as I do in a Scottish country pub, I have to act differently.

Similarly, if a Spanish guy comes to Scotland and continues to act in a "Spanish" way with Scottish people, he will seem excessively outgoing, possibly to the point of being creepy.  He too has to modify his behaviour to seem as reserved to us as he does to people in his own country.

Essentially, socially conditioned behaviours are not our identity; they're not even "markers" of our identity; they are simply a means of transmission of identity.  Some of the worst excesses of racism and xenophobia can be traced to the tendency to view behaviours as fixed markers of identity.  Anyone who acts differently is shunned.  Even homophobia is rooted in the same idea -- if you behave differently, you're "them", not "us".

And language is nothing if not a socially conditioned behaviour.

So this takes us back to the idea of linguistic convergence.  We do not speak like people in order to "be like them", but to show that "we like them".  Ever wonder why some foreign people don't want to talk to you?  They're not being snobbish -- they think you're being snobbish, because you're diverging from them.  Maintaining a heavy foreign accent isn't "keeping your own identity", but distancing yourself from the other party -- rejecting their identity, in effect.

In fact, I find myself converging when I speak to Spanish speakers from different regions.  The most notable example was when I was chatting up a Venezuelan (or was she Columbian) and my accent changed massively.  Yes, when you fancy someone, you converge very heavily towards their accent. 

I'm sure I'll get a couple of responses starting "ah, but what about...", so I'll try to pre-empt the biggest one.

"What about regional accents?  Do people from London have problems with people from Glasgow?"  No, because convergence does take place.  People from London and people from Glasgow find it difficult to understand each other, and they do modify their speech to help each other along.  There's give and take, but with a heavy-accented foreigner, the native is forced to do all the converging.  There's no reciprocation, so it becomes an imposition.

Native speakers do try to accommodate to non-native learners, but really, the lion's share of the effort has to come from the learner, he is the one that is demonstrably further from the social norm, and the native will normally only converge towards a neutral way of speaking, like a newsreader or teacher's professional accent.

Because, in the end accent is linked to their identity... for a native speaker.  When you ask someone to change their accent, you are actually asking them to modify their identity.

Your native accent is not part of your second-language identity.  You have to construct that identity for yourself.  Using your first-language accent in your second language presents an identity of being an outsider and being indifferent to the speakers of your host language.  Show them you want to get on with them and they'll want to talk to you.