So for this video, I am discussing the question: when does an accent become a problem? I talked about the case study of Singapore because there's definitely double standards going on in Singapore whereby some mistakes are considered acceptable because of the local accent, whilst others are not. I am very keen to hear from Singaporeans on this issue - let me know what you think! Many thanks for watching and look out for more videos on this playlist.
Thursday 13 August 2015
When does an accent become a problem?
I am launching a new playlist on my Youtube channel - I realized that I have actually made quite a number of videos on the issue of learning languages and my regular readers will know that this is a passion of mine. But this time I am broadening up the issue to the way we use languages to communicate and what this tells us about our society, so I am going to be covering a lot more than just learning languages. I have watched quite a few interesting Youtube videos exploring various aspects of linguistics and I want to add to the wealth of these videos on this theme. I realize that I am about to go to Singapore for three weeks and this is probably not the best time to launch a Youtube project, but I will be interviewing a gentleman in Singapore who fascinates me for this project and I thought I'd get it started this week.
So for this video, I am discussing the question: when does an accent become a problem? I talked about the case study of Singapore because there's definitely double standards going on in Singapore whereby some mistakes are considered acceptable because of the local accent, whilst others are not. I am very keen to hear from Singaporeans on this issue - let me know what you think! Many thanks for watching and look out for more videos on this playlist.
So for this video, I am discussing the question: when does an accent become a problem? I talked about the case study of Singapore because there's definitely double standards going on in Singapore whereby some mistakes are considered acceptable because of the local accent, whilst others are not. I am very keen to hear from Singaporeans on this issue - let me know what you think! Many thanks for watching and look out for more videos on this playlist.
It depends on the context, doesn't it? Jackie Chan speaking English with a Cantonese accent in a movie or interview is ok, but it's not great if he were a teacher in an English environment. LHL's standard English with a Singaporean accent (not too strong) is ok if he were to teach English Literature to my son as he would judged by his knowledge and grammar since he is very easy to understand. In business, I am more forgiving. I am more into what the deal or business plan is rather than the accent as long as I understand what I am getting into and the written documents are all in perfect English. I wouldn't sign on the dotted line otherwise. I am more put off by bad manners and dressing than an accent.
ReplyDeleteAaaah but you're talking about adults - what about school children and their education then? What kind of English should they be taught at school? It then become a question of whether the current batch of students are being prepared for jobs that will require them to do business all around the world, or if they can only work in Singapore and no where else.
DeleteThis is actually a rather big issue in the ESL teaching world, because the ESL teaching world is permeated by a bunch of fools who make use of the opportunity to pimp, sell lookism(and racism), and even engage in sex trafficking and rape (or seduction) of local girls wherever they go. This is no joke, and has been featured in news in a few countries, obviously for propagandistic reasons, such as Thailand and South Korea. On the one hand, these countries are so obsessed with the idea of an "American" or "English" accent, such that they would revert to the individual's "white" appearance as an indication of his or her having that "accent", and forget about other factors such as teaching experience, related qualifications and so on. This linguistic discrimination is tied up inevitably with racism and lookism, especially in South Korea (and even China), which explains why even skilled teachers of Indian, Chinese, Korean and other heritage are passed over. On the other hand, the linguistic discrimination aside, a lot of these teachers are not professionally trained teachers at all in the English language or literature whatsoever, and some are either backpackers and holiday-makers seeking to explore the world while on a pay-check, or people who are actually really unable to get a job at all in their own home country whatsoever without really good qualifications or experience.
DeleteI would believe that the accent is only as far as it goes. I can tolerate a lot of things, just like Di, with the exception of Singlish (which is bad English grammar). Even standard English with a slight Singaporean accent is tolerable, if the person is amenable to change, such as correcting his or her 'th' mispronunciations, remembering to keep the 'r' sounds (I have a strong North American rhotic, which actually makes many Singaporeans wonder where I got it, but that is from Canada), not messing up vowels and so on. Think, some Singaporeans seriously have very messed up pronunciation of words, pronouncing 'Canada' as 'Kay-nah-da', 'curry' as 'kah-ry', 'buffet' as 'boo-fay', 'love' as 'lah-ffeu' and the list goes on. If I was the recruiter hearing someone pronouncing 'three' as 'tree' and making all the blunders I mentioned, I would not employ that person to teach English, just to be honest.
But talking about which, do you even know that Gilbert Goh had worked in China for a year as an English teacher? He cannot write properly in English as you can tell from his website, and I was surprised that he could even get a job teaching English there years back, although China was and still is definitely in need of English teachers (whatever your nationality)........Nothing personal here, but seriously, I do not know what has gone wrong with recruiting standards for English teachers in a lot of Asian countries. South Korea wants whites only, but also employs Koreans who can barely pronounce "Coke" correctly, speaking the word as "cock" instead (LOL.....) while to even get a job doing so in China, if you are not "white" or a "western citizen", you had better wish for some miracle in the way of people who recognize your skills. I was offered a job once to teach English at a public Chinese university years back in 2011, but turned it down to go to Japan instead.
For Di and Alex, just purely for both your entertainment concerning Korean mispronunciations which are about as bad and worse than Singlish, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF7qw6TSP8g
DeleteI can say that this woman has basically failed her English communication class if I was the professor in university grading her! LOL.....
For children and in schools --- absolutely no Singlish! The teachers should speak standard English. Singaporean accent is one thing and quite inevitable, but I do not tolerate children speaking Singlish in a school setting. We are preparing them for a global future, are we need not? Accent - wise, teachers ought to be trained to speak with a neutral accent ideally, but that is a tall order.
DeleteAbout the issue of accents, and standardization, from an academic perspective, and as someone who was educated by Kiwis (New Zealanders), English, American, and Canadian, other than Singaporean teachers, I tend to believe that the idea of a "standard" accent in English (or even any other European language such as French, German, Greek or Dutch) is rather moot. An American friend of mine--born and bred in California near Davis, the valley area, admitted to many friends that when he first arrived in England on a trip as a missionary, he had immense difficulty understanding the English accent in London! Hahah...the thing about standardized British accent(s) taught in ESL textbooks is that the ones formulating them are largely of a panel of academics hailing from the London area, or educated in the Oxbridge League, and the accentual emphases are largely biased in that direction. That "standard" is arguably steeped in years of ossified British academic tradition and class structure hierarchy which is predicated upon the superiority of Oxbridge over all other institutions of learning.
DeleteAs for the idea of a 'lingua franca' or 'standard' base that can be understood even between "native speakers" of English such as Irish, English, Australians and New Zealanders, it is highly debatable, because some Australians cannot actually understand the English spoken by Irish from some regions such as Cork (no joke about the pronunciation here LOL), and so on. A former Irish housemate of mine in Sydney had told me that his first few weeks in Sydney was very miserable not only due to a lack of adequate finances, but also, because the Australians simply could not make out his accent! So much for "native speaker" status......
Kevin, you nailed it about the ESL schools. The students think they can speak like native speakers in one semester. Some of them do not even show up for classes all semester but are out at the casinos. Their English is notoriously bad, but hey, they love telling their moms and dad's in South Korea or China that their teachers are white. Racist twits.
DeleteAbout those MOE teachers ---is it too much to ask that not use Singlish? It is extremely unprofessional.
The parents are actually the racist ones. It starts from young in the Korean hagwons(academies), where if any teacher displays signs of being other than 'white', the parents will complain to the manager or hiring personnel about the teacher's race and skin color, and then, the manager will be pressurized to fire the teacher based on that. Some of the white-skinned teachers are not even trained, and got their jobs because of their skin color.
DeleteDi, I actually had a Singaporean teacher in JC days who was short-tongued, and being our GP teacher, she seriously had a hard time teaching us, since our class simply knew it when she was struggling to pronounce words properly. If we were not skipping classes because of a lack of interest, then we would be actually sitting in during classes fully aware that she mispronounced words. Although she was not still speaking in Singlish, her Singaporean accent was not even much clearer because she stumbled at a lot of words. It has to do with a physiological or vocal (chord) problem as a result of her short tongue, and sadly, I can say that she seriously should not even be teaching any English at all, because she is likely to pass that problem of mispronunciation down to secondary school children too. She was not even fresh from MOE, but an experienced teacher from a secondary school who requested for a transfer to a JC! To be honest, if you want to hire good, professional English teachers, then the hiring personnel should be good in English too, because if you get hiring personnel who are terrible in English to decide the hiring process for English teachers, then you are likely to end up finding either inexperienced or unprofessional teachers in English. It was exactly the latter for the case of South Korean academies (private schools) and MOE English teachers.
DeleteYou know what the irony is in my JC experience? Because I was in the humanities programme at VJC, all my teachers (apart for Chinese and PE) were white expatriates but not a single one of them seemed to make any effort to alter our accents or even try to correct the way we speak. Not even in TSD (theatre studies) where you have to get on stage and perform plays in English. Rather, we were guided towards staging pieces with a local flavour, so that our Singaporean accents wouldn't seem out of place.
DeleteYes, it seems ironic. The Chinese (in the PRC) seem to go by the logic that "whites speak English with a clearer pronunciation", while allegedly, native speakers by that definition do not technically care so much and seem to be rather lax and tolerant of accentual differences. It is for this very reason that I believe Asians are potentially more racist and discriminatory than Caucasians in this area, especially with regards to linguistic discrimination.
DeleteMy negative experiences with people in terms of accentual differences were mainly with Koreans (including some Korean Americans who live in South Korea) and PRCs, and Japanese actually do not seem to bug me as much as the former two groups because they actually allow for "non"--native speakers (people not born in the west) to teach English as long as these people demonstrate adequate skills and qualifications. The Koreans, in fact, seem to be rather disgustingly of the mind that only being white and being born in an "approved" western country--that equates America and Canada largely for them (less so the UK or even Australia)--means that you speak "standard" English, and if you know any Asian language, there is also the perception that knowledge of that will "contaminate" your American or Canadian accent!
DeleteKoreans, Japanese, Chinese, ... they all love white teachers. Actually, they love the white skin. Period. I get a good laugh when my white friends travel to Asia and proclaim how friendly and wonderful the people are. I have to break it to them that Asians love white tourists more than others. My girlfriend who used to work at SIA admitted that the cabin crew often treated white passengers better than others. It wasn't that they were rude to the non whites. It was just that the whites got that extra mile. Even here, my husband and I often noticed that Chinese servers are more enthusiastic to serve white patrons at a restaurant. Regular Chinese patrons who speak Chinese get better service too. However, if you are someone like me who isn't white and do not speak Chinese, you get the standard service that is lukewarm. Asians are definitely more racist and discriminatory than whites. And not just with regards to linguistic preferences.
DeleteWorking in China years ago, I often got the evil eye when I went out. They expected me to speak Mandarin, and I didn't. My white colleagues had great things to say about the people. Duh! They were treated like royalty!
Well, for Koreans, it goes beyond linguistic discrimination for sure. Based on my time there, I get the sense that Korea is for Koreans, and secondarily for whites (as guests). If you do not fall within these two groups (if you are not even an overseas-born Korean) , Koreans will not treat you as a human especially at the workplace. I know of Filipinas who married Koreans, and well, let's just say that one or two of them talk about how they are being treated by their bosses who are Koreans when working as English teachers for them, constantly being seen as inferior to the "beautiful white" and non-human, and made to work for less money but more than what the "native speaker" teaches.
DeleteKevin: I have seen that cock - coke video before. It was hilarious and a classic of its own kind. I wonder if it was meant to be a joke. Surely someone would have pointed out her errors? It's just too implausible.
DeleteDi, Kevin, it is not just Koreans, Japanese or Chinese. Even here in Singapore, the whites are given greater leeway. Service staff tend to serve them with more effort - my regular caffeine fix server told me that is because the whites will banter more and ask more questions about their coffee source, are they eco friendly etc. They anticipated that the whites will expect more but that Asians are much less likely to ask. Similarly in the healthcare industry, a speaker coming from US / Europe / Australia who is white will be accorded greater status as a key opinion influencer while an Asian / non white is considered as just normal. Yup, even if the latter was born, bred and educated his / her whole life in Europe and published research work extensively. It was particularly obvious once when I was involved in a scientific press release event in Taiwan, the Taiwanese client was extremely concerned when I edited the English statement from the US expert presenter - she felt that being from US, the presenter should be more accurate. It was a statement to the press for goodness sake - of course I had to correct those sections where the presenter clearly spelled the words wrongly (e.g. neccesary instead of necessary) or used technically loaded words without clarifying in layperson terms (e.g. menorrhagia as opposed to heavy menstrual bleeding). It all goes to show how much the idea of perception of what is considered "native English speakers" looks like to Asians. Perhaps it will take another generation of further global exposure for things to change.
DeleteOh, please! Many white people do not even know the rule of saying the as in thuh vs thee. Ex: the car vs thee other car. "The" is "thee" before a vowel sound, but not all native speakers know that. Shane is right --- when the opinion or even language rule comes from a non-native speaker, other non-native speakers tend to be more questioning. When a "native" speaker says something, he/she is given more credibility. That is just stupid. Asians (esp. Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese) need to know that not all white people have a good grasp of the English language even though they may have the sought after white accent.
DeleteDi, to be honest though, the Korean language has two vowels, the 'eo' sound which sounds like 'or' while the 'o' sound sounds like 'oh'. The girl seems to have confused 'oh' with 'eo', which might be embarrassing, but is actually to be expected from Koreans.
DeleteActually, I thought this is relatively straightforward? The primary objective is to speak in a way which will suit the occasion. Thus, if it is a formal presentation, you do not use market speech. If you are speaking to a non local, you do not use the local dialect / speech pattern. For instance, my former Swiss colleagues all used Swiss German among themselves but will happily switch to high German or English with non Swiss. Likewise, you can use Singlish when talking to a fellow Singaporean or Malaysian but I sure as heck will not do that if I am speaking to my British boss and colleagues. Is it not simply common sense that you try to use a more neutral accent and tone down on say the Singlish accent when dealing with somebody not from Singapore so as to facilitate understanding?
ReplyDeleteYou almost made the same point as Di about, hence the cut and paste response: Aaaah but you're talking about adults - what about school children and their education then? What kind of English should they be taught at school? It then become a question of whether the current batch of students are being prepared for jobs that will require them to do business all around the world, or if they can only work in Singapore and no where else.
DeleteAre all Singaporeans able to code switch the way you have described? No all are capable of doing so - you'll be amazed how many can only talk the way they talk - in a very Singaporean way - and they talk in exactly the same manner to foreigners (who end up terrible confused).
Ok, I guess Di and I had the same overall thought process on this :)
DeletePoint taken that not all can make the switch. Unfortunately, it is something that needs practice. I am afraid that the primary incentive will be that you really want your target audience to be able to understand you. Say somebody like my father who spent his whole life dealing with local dialect speaking businessmen and suppliers from Malaysia and China. He never bothered. Up to the point where I had to take on a regional role, I was guilty of it myself. When I realised that the Singaporean accent is actually very hard to comprehend, I had to force myself to slow down, adopt a more neutral accent and make more effort to be understood. People do appreciate it when they see you try to make that extra effort and they certainly will be even happier if you make attempts to connect in their native tongue although the outcomes may initially sound bad.
Personally, I am divided over how students to be taught. Ideally, we want it to be something that is neutral and easily understood but practically, how do we do that when the people at large around you are heavily accented? A conscious effort will need to be made to not use creole Singlish and to switch to formal English when dealing with a non Singaporean.
I think that other than the mistake made with the slippage between "t" and "th", there are some rather glaring mistakes such as the ellipsis of prepositions including "to" (instead of saying "I am going TO the market", they actually say, "I am going the market"), syntactical misplacement, and the direct translation of proto-Chinese sentence structures into English which do not make sense whatsoever. Sometimes, my sisters message me in Singlish on Facebook, and I have to say that being the grammar Nazi that I am (regardless of what people say about being lax with family and friends), I had to say directly that I did not understand them.
ReplyDeleteYup, English sentences created with Chinese grammar - that's Singlish for you!
DeleteI go market --- that is more likely what they will say.
DeleteAlso, instead of saying, "I have gone to the market", they will say, "I got go to the market". It is bad English.
DeleteI go mah kit or ledy!
DeleteO yes, and that too....they (the ones who can only use Singlish) cannot distinguish between 'l' and 'r'. I wonder if it has to do with their reliance on Chinese or Malay as a mother tongue?
DeleteChinese, Kevin.
DeleteI noticed though that even Malays in Singapore have a very similar and FLAT intonation when they speak, which makes them sound almost no different from Singaporean Chinese.....
DeleteSame with the Filipinos. On top of that, they would say, "It's laining in Bang coo ba!" ("It's raining in Vancouver!" And Fly day vs. Friday. Drives me nuts.
DeleteKevin, I do not think that it has anything to do with Mandarin or Malay as mother tongues. I have not heard anyone pronounce say rojak or rancun as lojak or lancun. Similarly, spoken Mandarin does have plenty of characters which require the rolling Rs e.g. human (ren). I do believe that the poor distinction between the "L" and "R" sound stem from the fact that the native tongues of most Chinese Singaporeans tend to be southern dialects (e.g. Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese) - these tongues are rich in intonations but as far as I know, they do not use rolling tongue pronunciations. Thus, there is no R equivalents. But there are plenty of "L" like words. A native dialect speaker is thus much more likely to pronounce the R sound into an L sound - my father is totally guilty of that. Even for the Malays, the main reason for using English is when conversing with a non Malay speaker when pidgin Malay fails. If the Chinese form the big bulk of those, it becomes unsurprising that even the Malays may resort to a Chinese dialect influenced way of pronouncing grass to grlass or the classic durian (dooRI-arn) to become lew lian. It certainly reinforces it more that the mispronounced form is readily understood by local populace who have been so used to the strange mixed up way of malappropos speech. This technically should only affect the older generation of non native English speakers. Unfortunately, even the younger Singaporeans are happily flattening and mispronouncing the L and R terms among themselves. I suspect that it will take a longer period of headbanging and realisation that they just could not be understood by non natives that things will buck up.
DeleteMeanwhile, the lew lian is here to stay. Personally, I cringe even at the way the word durian is pronounced by anglophiles. I had always called it a duri (dooRI) - an (arn, with the ahh sound) the way it sounds in Bahasa Melayu, duri being thorn.
I think there's a difference between accent and pronunciation. Most of what you were referring to in your video seems to me to be pronunciation errors (that's why I think there's an error when someone can't pronounce the 'th') instead of accent.
ReplyDeleteAccent is more like how the melody of a sentence sounds like without the words. ie you could try saying a sentence, and then hum to the tune of the sentence that you've just said. It's quite possible to pronounce the 'th' with a Singaporean accent. But when you pronounce "three" as "tree" in a Singaporean accent, I would assume you're speaking singlish instead of standard English with a Singaporean accent.
Aaah but that's you being very objective. There are Singaporeans who make all kinds of pronunciation errors and when challenged, they adamantly deny that they've made any mistakes and simply claim, "how dare you discriminate against the way I speak English just because I have a Singaporean accent!" According to them, the fact that they have a Singaporean accent gives them a license to get away with any mistake at all so their English (according to them) is perfect, but with a Singaporean accent - but what I hear is a lot of mispronunciation... So when is it a mispronunciation, when is it simply a question of accent? Ironically I tend to agree with you - but then again, you're not saying what most Singaporeans claim.
DeleteSometimes some Singaporeans would assume you're too atas and so on. Ah yes, you have a point there. Mispronunciation may arise when someone speaks with too thick of an accent. That said, do you think it's possible that there's only one right accent for each language? After all, the English language originated from England. It's only normal that people would be able to best speak the language there.
DeleteIt is just like a Singaporean who pronounces "salmon" as "sell-men", "curry" as "car-li", when in fact these sounds are very much messed up by them to begin with. It reminds me of something. Years back in Japan, I encountered a former Singaporean lawyer and her other friend, a translator, who were both doing a Master's in Linguistics at the same university where I was lecturing. They met me over tea with one of the girl's boyfriends, an American, who said that he could totally understand my accent even coming from his perspective as an American, while he simply cannot understand his girlfriend's parents at all whatsoever. I was like, "I do not really count! I have been living in Canada and the USA for a while LOL!"
DeleteWell I do notice how my English slips into a very non-standard form of Singaporean English/Singlish when I am speaking with my family and out comes all the loanwords from Hokkien - here's the thing though, I recognize that yes I am communicating very differently because we are a Hokkien-speaking family and the way we speak makes complete sense to each other. However, we don't try to pretend that it is PERFECT English with a Singaporean accent - I remember trying to explain the term 'abuden' to an Angmoh who assumed it was a loanword from Tamil or Malay and I had to explain how it was a word invented in Singapore as a contraction of "Ah-But-Then" and takes on a whole new, unique meaning in Singlish.
DeleteIn England where I live, there is a huge range of accents even amongst local, native speakers of English and we are a very class conscious society. People will judge you for your accent: are you atas or working class? Are you rich or poor? Are you well educated or barely literate?
I refer you to Vicki Pollard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taeQLQsORuw
Yo yo yo - check out my latest video http://limpehft.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/eurkea-languages-20-my-latest-polyglot.html
ReplyDelete