Unit05-2

Foreign Accents

Section One

As far as I'm concerned, I do tend to judge people I meet by their accents. I don't mean that I'm a sort of snob, and only like people with upper-class accents, but I never feel comfortable with a new person until I've been able to place them from the way they speak. If it's an English person, I feel much more at ease if I can say "Ah, he comes from Liverpool", or "He's probably been to a public school [1]". I suppose then I know what to talk about and what to expect from the other person.

The same is true of foreigners. Personally, I prefer a foreigner to speak with a recognizable foreign accent, so that I know that I'm　talking to a Frenchman, a Ghanaian, a Pole, and so on. So for me, it seems a bit pointless for foreigners to try desperately hard to get rid of their national accents and try to speak BBC English. If someone is clearly French, I know there's no point in talking about cricket[2]or making jokes about the Irish[3]. And frankly, I think it even sounds more attractive. I can't really explain why, but if people have foreign accents, they seem to be more interesting, even if they are saying the most ordinary things.

Section Two

Mind you [4], there is a limit to intelligibility. If the accent is so strong that you have a struggle to understand what they are trying to say, then that gets in the way of the conversation, and the flow is broken while you try to sort out the sounds into meaningful bits. I don't mean an accent as strong as that. I'm talking about the kind of accents whereby you can tell immediately which countries people come from, but which don't prevent you from following what they are saying. I suppose it's the kind of accent most foreigners have, really. To be honest, it's only a very few who have such a good ear that they produce more or less genuine British English, and even then it can be quite amusing because they may have picked up a clearly regional accent, or even a very upper-class accent which doesn't fit in with their character at all. [5] But most foreigners who learn English are desperately keen to get rid of their foreign accents and waste a lot of time trying to do so.

Section Three

On the other hand, I've got to sympathize with them and even admire them, because I speak quite reasonable French myself, and I'm always very pleased when I'm taken for a Frenchman and feel quite discouraged when someone immediately spots that I'm English. But there again, to my ear, French spoken with an English accent sounds really ugly, and I feel uncomfortable when I hear a fellow countryman murdering the language [6]. So I suppose foreigners feel the same way when they hear compatriots doing the same to English. However, I have been told by French friends that French spoken with a certain degree of English accent doesn't offend their ears at all, and in fact sounds quite charming. I've been told that Petula Clark was a successful singer in France partly because of her English accent, and I suppose that one of the most celebrated French speakers of English was that actor, Maurice Chier, who made a career out of sounding French and who could probably have spoken it with much less of an accent if he had really wanted to.

I contrast him with a French friend of mine who obviously had a gift for languages, and was always being taken for a well-educated Englishman when I was with him in England. Because of the way he spoke, my English friends assumed he knew all about certain facets of English life which you can only learn by living in the country for years. So he often had to ask me to explain things to him after an evening in the pub. I don't know how much time he had spent getting his accent right, but perhaps he could have spent his time better broadening his vocabulary and knowledge of the country. Now that English is such an international language, I think we should accept a wider range of accents and learners should concentrate more on structure and vocabulary than accent.

Not Just Parrot-Talk

Scientists have taught a parrot English. So what?[1] This time, it seems, the bird not only says the words but also understands them. Alex, an African grey parrot residing at America's Purdue University in Indiana, has a vocabulary of about 40 words with which he identifies, requests and sometimes refuses more than 50 toys. He seems to manipulate words as abstract symbols—in other words, to use a primitive form of language.
In many birds, communication takes the form of simple, stereotyped signals. Some birds, like parrots, are capable of learning huge repertoires of phrases by mimicking each other or other species. But, until now, there has been no evidence that any bird could make the big leap to associating one sound exclusively with one object or quality.
Alex can. Dr Irene Pepperberg, his trainer, exploited the natural curiosity of the parrot to teach him to use the names of different toys. The trainer and an assistant play with the toys and ask each other questions about them. To join in, the parrot has to compete for the trainer's attention.
The results have been spectacular. Alex rapidly learned to ask for certain objects, identifying them by words for shape, colour20 and material (e.g. three-cornered green paper, or five-cornered yellow wood). He is asked to repeat words until he gets them right and is then rewarded by being given the object to play with. Dr Pepperberg believes it is important that the bird is not rewarded with food, because that would make him think of words as ways of getting treats rather than as symbols for objects[2].
Twice a week, Alex is tested and he normally gets about 80% of the objects right. The mistakes are usually small omissions (for instance, he forgets to name the colour of an object) rather than specific errors. To discover if he really is able to grasp concepts like colour and shape, he is shown entirely novel[3]combinations. When first shown a blue piece of leather he said "blue hide[4]"even though the blue object he had previously seen were all keys or made of wood. This suggests that he is aware that words are building blocks[5] that can be used in different combinations.
Still, a vocabulary of adjectives and nouns hardly amounts to mastery of a language. The scientists have been looking for evidence that Alex understands more complicated ideas. One unexpected breakthrough was when he learned to say "no". He picked this up from the conversations between the trainer and her assistant and seems to understand at least one meaning of the word—rejection (for instance, when Dr Pepperberg tries to play with him and he does not feel like it). He can also count to five when asked how many objects are being shown.
There are occasional hints that he has grasped even more advanced concepts but Dr Pepperberg is cautious. Public reaction to the abilities of chimpanzees to use sign language has recently descended from excitement to bitterness[6] and nobody dare make extravagant　claims any more. It is not that people doubt the ability of apes to accumulate a large vocabulary of signs. The argument is about whether apes can understand syntax.
Examples　which seem to show them doing so are few and disputed. For instance, Washoe[7], the first and most famous of the talking chimpanzees, once pointed to a swan and signed "water bird". Or did she? Dr Herbert Terrace of Columbia University　pointed out that she might simply have signed "water" and "bird" in quick succession.
Other sceptics argue that, in the course of a lifetime, it would be surprising if such apes did not occasionally produce syntactical combinations of signs by pure chance. A more serious criticism is that the apes are responding to unconscious cues from their trainers.
Unconscious cueing is known as the "clever Hans effect" in honour of a famous horse in nineteenth-century Germany. Hans appeared to knock out the answers to mathematical sums with his hoof. In fact, the horse was not doing the sums but was responding to subtle signs from the crowd which told him when to stop. When the crowd did not know the answer, Hans could not do the sum.
Dr Pepperberg believes that her experiments are free of such an effect because speech is less easy to cue than sign language. She argues that this makes talking parrots better subjects than signing apes for probing the limits of animal intelligence. She would like to see Alex (or, even better, a young parrot) compared with children to see if the bird discovers ideas in the same order as the children do and exactly where the children leave the bird behind.