Variations of and in World Englishes, and a focus on accent with Lippi-Green

“How was your weekend?” I asked my sister.
“It was fine. We had to go out to Itasca,” she responded.

The way she dragged out the middle syllable of “Itasca” reminded me of something. She didn’t talk like that before she graduated from college. What was it?

Oh. She’d moved to the Chicago area to take a job in the suburbs. And she’d picked up what I then considered to be a … twang. A Chicago twang. Different from that of Wisconsin. Or MinnesOtah. Or the small rural area three hours south of Chicago, where we grew up.

Oddly, at the same time, she picked up a couple of behavioral and preferential quirks. No longer was she a country girl. And, once married a few years later, everything in her house had to be either black or white. Even the photos of her kids. That was her “style.”

I’ve refused to generalize and say that what I consider her accent is in some way related to her slightly-changed identity. But I wonder sometimes if her disdain for all things “south of I-80” except Monical’s Pizza is connected ever-so-subtly to her adopted pronunciation. Is this resistance? Is her adoption of a regional accent part of her shedding her rural-Illinois skin?

At any rate, I picked up on it quite quickly. Just as others do when they hear my voice.

“So, where are you from?” the bartender at the hotel in Hawaii asks me. Hmm. Do I not look American? In Italy, I expect to be viewed as a foreigner (I have to have a map. That always gives me away). But not in Hawaii.

And, yet, this week we read of accent, dialect, and language and learn that there was a competent meteorologist from Hawaii who did not get a job for which he was (almost over-)qualified because he spoke Hawai’ian Creole English (Ok, so Hawaii is in America, and it’s a type of English…where is the problem?? Wouldn’t people be able to comprehend when he said it would rain? Snow?).

Foregrounding Lippi-Green’s chapter on accent is our reading in McKay and Bokhorst-Heng that illustrates how linguistic varieties “live” on a micro-level. I use the word “live” because, as we’ve learned, that’s exactly what languages do: They are not static, they have movement, they morph and vary and fluctuate, depending on user, context, and interlocutor. We’ve discussed World Englishes as a concept already, but now we read of the norms and variations of those World Englishes (and between them).

Several different models of organizing ranges of varieties of language are given in the text; my favorite is Pakir’s (1991) as it seems to be the most adaptable as well as the one that makes the most sense in terms of all the variables. Two points, though, that McKay and Bokhorst-Heng make about these models bears repeating:
• What all of these interpretations attempt to do is to develop a model that describes and legitimizes a pluricentric view of English and one that moves away from any view of there being just one standard form against which all others are measured.
• …new Englishes cannot be characterized in terms of acquisitional inadequacy, or be judged by the norms of English in Inner Circle countries. (128)

The authors state then, in summary, that “The World Englishes paradigm thus stresses the pluricentric nature of English: as a result of its spread and contact with indigenous languages, English has acquired many centers from which norms and innovations are created” (128).

The authors’ motivation in making these points? To counter monolingual ideology, the implication that Standard English is something concrete, something other than an abstraction or an idea. Something that can be “acquired.”

An argument in support of a monolingual, “standard” English that is used as a benchmark for all Englishes is made by Randolph Quirk. As discussed in the text, Quirk felt that acceptance or condoning of variations of English would be detrimental to English as an international language. The “standard” needed to be upheld, according to his theory, or else all other Englishes would run amok and become unintelligible.

Countering this monolingual stance was Braj Kachru (this debate occurred in 1984, according to our text) who asserted that linguistic varieties were not only not detrimental to intelligibility but would yield an “educated variety” of English that would be highly intelligible across cultures.

McKay and Bokhost-Heng venture into pragmatics when discussing intelligibility and explain that, because communication is an interactional thing, we need to look at the three categories of interaction that are central to communication (as provided by Smith, 1992 in the text): intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability, with interpretability being the most important part of the act. Thinking to the example of the Australian woman in a taxi driven by a Turkish man in Instanbul, we see that, indeed, we may be able to intelligibly understand the words, we may be able to comprehend the act or intent of the speech act, but unless we can interpret – or make sense of the cultural or linguistic loading of the message – we cannot really communicate.

Lippi-Green answered a question I’ve had since the beginning of this course (and probably before, but I didn’t really think about it): What is the difference between accent, dialect, and language? Lippi-Green insinuates that, really, there isn’t a difference; however, she sees value in using the term “accent” and so leaves it, operationalized as a way to talk about phonological differences among variations of a language.

Interestingly, her allegory of second-language acquisition to building a Sound House is includes space for Universal Grammar and the Critical Period Hypothesis, but it seems very simplistic (granted, for this article, there was no way she could cover the whole area of SLA). She does dismiss some SLA research that claims that there are plenty of adults who can build a new Sound House (not in the same way they built their first one, but they can build it to fool native speakers!). But I’m left wondering how this judge made this decision regarding Mr. Kahakua, and I’m wondering if – really – we are still THAT far away from