Foreign Accents¶
There’s a phenomenon that I’ve been observing, and I think it’s time to share my thoughts. In my experience, when someone goes to visit a place and tries to learn some of the language and speak it, the reaction comes in two flavors: people either (type I) act delighted and try to help with the learning, or (type II) switch to English.
The type I reaction is easy to understand. The happy-seeming person is sharing their language and investing in it. They want good things for their language, and they have the patience to help a foreigner struggle their way through it.
Type II, I think, comes with a bigger variety of motivations. Maybe the person is impatient and just wants to communicate. Maybe they’re not that interested in the language itself. Maybe they don’t want their language being abused by inexpert speakers. Maybe they want to make life as easy as possible for their foreign interlocutor.
There’s a third flavor, where people are just not confident (or capable) in their English and don’t necessarily slip into teacher role, but I’m focused on people whose English skills are good enough that they could choose either of the other two reactions.
The thing I want to talk about is the second reaction, and the role played by funny accents. I’m used to being an American in America, where everyone’s expected to speak English even if they’re not great at it. If a tourist at a restaurant is struggling to speak English (very rare) I do not expect the waiter to try to switch to Mandarin or Hindi or Spanish or whatever. I expect them (unless it’s an ethnic restaurant and the tourist is from an appropriate place) to muddle through in English. Maybe, these days, with help from a translation app on someone’s phone. Probably the tourist’s.
This leads to the development of a particular skill among native English speakers, that I think is missing from speakers of less universal languages: understanding people who have weird accents.
Non-native speakers have to develop this skill in English too, sometimes, when they have to get by in highly international environments, but native speakers of English start early. Everyone who grew up watching movies with Antonio Banderas or Arnold Schwarzenegger got at least some exposure to “foreigner with accent.” Those of us who grew up in places with immigrant communities, of which there are many, also got exposure. In highly-homogenized, somewhat-rural Connecticut, I knew kids whose first languages were Spanish, Russian, and Hindi.
Of course, there are also foreign native accents, like South African and Australian, as well as non-foreign regional accents like (for me, an American) The South, and The Midwest, and most languages have that. Germans can tell if a speaker is Swiss just as a Parisian could pick out a Canadian.
This isn’t that, though it’s not unrelated. I have a Belgian friend who’s had Dutch waiters switch to English on her.
My point is that a typical Dutch speaker doesn’t need to learn to understand American-accented Dutch, because they speak the lingua franca perfectly well. It doesn’t matter that I think their English sounds peculiar with all the final Ds and THs turned into hard Ts, or that they frequently skip the “ly” in adverbs. I know from context whether they’re talking about tithes or tides, and the path to success here is for me to understand them in English.
And since the typical Dutch speaker doesn’t need to learn to understand American-accented Dutch, they don’t. I’ve seen a lot of complaints that learning Dutch is hard because everyone speaks English and is eager to switch to English. This comes back to those reactions above, and I think that most of the time when I encounter type II reactions, it’s because the other person wants to be helpful. But sometimes it’s because they have trouble understanding my Dutch. I have a funny accent, and not the kind from Friesland. It probably takes more effort for native speakers to understand me. It doesn’t matter that their English is also funnily accented; everyone has a funny accent in English.
I wonder if this phenomenon exists in other popular languages. It seems like it’d have to happen either in a melting-pot country like the US, or somewhere that speaking any language other than the main one is relatively rare, like the US. Spanish speakers might have to contend with a wide variety of different native accents, which might be harder than non-native accents. I’ve certainly struggled to understand Indians before.
Anyway, that’s my weird observation for today. I don’t have comments on this site, but if you want to engage in a discussion about it, I have a contact page with my info.