Accents in America: A Structuralist Examination of Foreign Language in the United States - Article Example

Accents in America: A structuralist examination of foreign language in the United s One of the most interesting features of the American experience is the evolution of its language in conjunction with its fierce sense of identity. For while the United States has seen its language emerge from what is arguably the most varied group of spoken languages ever voluntarily concentrated in one area, it has fought tooth and nail the acceptance of the fact of its multicultural linguistic base even as it adopted the speech patterns and vocabularies it officially disdained. Language is not, perhaps, the be-all, end-all of existence (though those of a Judeo Christian bent might argue otherwise), but the fact remains that the things we think of as representative of life as human beings — love, war, family, government, etc. — are inevitably expressed in language. In other words, it’s safe to say that the fact that we speak American English doesn’t make us Americans, but American English is the way, and perhaps the most important way, that we express our American-ness. What’s interesting about our American dependence on language is that what we consider to be “our language” doesn’t necessarily reflect the way that people of the United States actually speak, a fact that affects all linguistic systems, as Ferdinand de Saussere pointed out in his groundbreaking Course in General Linguistics. Saussere made a distinction between what he called langue and parole: Langue is the set of rules that make up language, the grammatical structure of speech and the appropriate vocabulary; parole is the way that people actually use language when they talk to each other. (Saussere) An easy way to think of it is that langue is the English you learn in school; parole is the way you talk to your friends. Even though langue is the “correct” use of the language, most people who are native speakers of that language are just as likely — if not more likely — to understand parole. Noam Chomsky explains that there is a difference between competence, the name he gives to ideal use of language, and performance, the way individuals actually use language. (89) To boil it down to the essential point, “language at any given time involves an established system and an evolution.” (Saussere 13) American English is no different, though its evolution has been an interesting combination of stubborn traditionalism and melting pot transformation. At the same time that the country encouraged “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to come to the country of opportunity, it made it clear that America was its own place, with its own language. Accents may have been common and may remain common in modern day America, but they were not “American.” Americans have been obsessed with their own American-ness since the country’s earliest days. (Baym) And yet even as immigrants were encouraged to strive for that inflection-free Midwestern accent that gives such good television, they contributed to the evolution of the American language. (It is in some ways silly to refer to American English as English, since it is such an entirely other creature from the Mother Tongue from which it was derived.) Foreign languages have made American English more flexible and descriptive than it might otherwise have been, better able to deal with the challenges of inscribing in language a continent whose scope dwarfed that of much of Europe. America was a country that required new vocabulary, and it came bountifully from the varied inhabitants of the country. Reading early American history, it may seem that America was largely populated by British citizens from its earliest days, but the truth is that America has been a melting pot of languages since its creation. Even ignoring the hundreds of languages that existed among the Native Americans before the first European settlers arrived, the earliest Americans were as likely to be Spanish settlers or French traders as they were to be British colonists. It is, perhaps, utterly characteristic of the path that America was to follow linguistically that the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and other political documents of early American importance were transcribed in English instead of in French, which was then considered the universal language of diplomacy. America was stubbornly eager to expose its otherness, to manifest its difference from the nations that had existed before it. One place this American insistence on its own language comes across particularly clearly is in American literature. Nina Baym argues that American literature is distinguished by the fact that it uses American-ness rather than other critical standards as its criteria for excellence. In some ways, this is understandable: American wanted to separate itself from Great Britain in every possible way, and using British literature as a measuring stick for American work was potentially problematic. “Inevitably, perhaps, it came to seem that the quality of ‘American-ness,’ whatever it might be, constituted literary excellence for American authors.” (Baym 148) What’s especially intriguing about this kind of evaluation is that it gives the critic permission — indeed, it gives him a mandate — to judge some forms of literature and language as “more” American than others: Before he is through, the critic has had to insist that some works in American are much more American than others, and his is as busy excluding certain writers as ‘un-American’ as he is including others. Such a proceeding in the political arena would be extremely suspect, but in criticism it has been the method of choice. (149) Literature and language become tools in the expression of American-ness and are seen to succeed or fail in their efforts to communicate American-ness. That American-ness is defined by language and that language is then judged by its essential American-ness is a bit of a paradox. Surely the various accents that comprise the American experience can be considered as American as the aforementioned newscaster accent of the middle West, yet ethnic accents are seldom embraced by the American population. For Jacques Derrida, these contradictions are the inevitable companion of all things linguistically inscribed (which is to say, ultimately, all things). Language, Derrida says, “is a problem of economy and strategy.” (96) Derrida argues that people want to believe that words have fixed meaning, but that every meaning varies depending on a thousand different variables that affect it, including accents. If a middle-aged, Midwestern American woman says “Let’s have lunch,” it reads audibly quite differently from the identical sentence said by a Middle Eastern man in his early 20s. And yet both are speaking American English, using the same words and the same syntax. The American language is certainly a living language, in the sense that it is almost constantly in flux. Every choice about what constitutes “appropriate” language and pronunciation and what is “inappropriate” language and pronunciation constitutes a political choice, says Julia Kristeva. She argues that linguistics is political because it privileges certain “speaking subjects” over others — in much the way that many Americans complain about Mexicans speaking with Spanish accents in restaurants or native Indian customer service representatives at call centers while oohing and ahhing over British and French accents. Kristeva argues that to properly study linguistics and understand the nature of speech, we must break away from notions of privilege and evaluate language as it is actually used. Perhaps it is the scope of America that makes it so vulnerable to linguistic xenophobia. To maintain a national culture across such a large and diverse tract of land requires a certain stubborn cultural identity, and there’s no denying that language forms the backbone of most identity. Accents challenge the uniformity of American life, a utopian uniformity that exists only in the imagination but that nevertheless requires diligent defending. How can we know what is American if we do not know what is not American? We rely on that sense of other to define ourselves, to maintain our separateness and sharpen our identity. Without the accents from other countries, American English would be flat, insufficient to describe the American experience and stagnant. But without repudiating accents from other countries as indeed “other,” American English would not have its sense of cultural and linguistic difference, it would not have its nationalistic certainty or its individual identity. America has relied on other languages to enrich its vocabulary and define its distinctness. Though it depends on other languages, it despises them for their otherness, even as it relies on that otherness to define itself. For that reason alone, American remains a place where accents are powerful in a way that they are not in other parts of the world. America is a place where accents can shatter and rebuild worlds, where accents can be harbingers of meaning and change. It is a place where accents still matter and mean something, though what they mean is not always fixed — nor is it always what one expected. Works Cited Baym, Nina. Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton, 1957. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences.” Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Jameson, Fredric. The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Kristeva, Julia. “The Ethics of Linguistics.” Essays in Semiotics. The Hague : Mouton, 1971. Saussere, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Read More