Well, it looks like my going-on-25-years in New York City has finally eradicated my Midwestern accent, or so one of those online tests says. I am now not from anywhere. I am the woman without a region, a citizen at large. My mother always insisted that while my dad spoke unadulterated Pittsburghese with an associated creole of Kottnerisms, what she spoke was "American English," the equivalent of BBC English. Hawgwash. Newscaster English, especially in Britain (though here too) is completely artificial and unregional purposefully, to make us all seem more homogeneous and heterogeneous than we are.
I've been thinking about language, especially spoken language, quite a lot again since I started tutoring, since spoken language plays such a large role in how well one writes. I tell some of my students to read their papers aloud to themselves and they will hear where commas go, where periods belong. This only works with some of them, though, either because they come to English as a second language and the rhythms of their first one are different and still overlay their second language, or because their reading skills are so poor that they read word by word rather than phrase by phrase. So the rule I learned—that you insert a comma where you take a breath or where you naturally pause—doesn't work for them. Then we have to fall back on rules and examples, which, frankly, I hate.
I hate it because it's an artifical way to learn a language, any language, even your own. Nobody makes conscious grammatical decisions, when speaking, about what tenses to use, or is that noun plural or singular so what should the verb be? Being able to hear what sounds correct in grammar is more important, I think, than being able to explain or even understand why. Accept that these are the agreed-upon, arbitrary rules of a language, and then learn the way it sounds. Grammar is often like gravity: it just is. Nobody knows why it's this way, but when the rules were codified (thanks, Sam Johnson) somebody often just decided it sound better this way. Let me repeat that: Somebody decided it sounded better this way. As with history, the winners write the stories, and the educated elite codified the "correct" language. It's another manifestation and tool of class and regional snobbery.
I think fondly of the early anarchy of English spelling and sentence structure around Caxton's time. It must have made reading harder, but then, so few people did it. But it made the language rich: rich in accents, in words, in metaphors and images. The other day, one of my students accidentally made an absolutely beautiful, metaphoric line by using a word that sounded very similar to the one she really needed. I wanted to steal it from her, it was so gorgeous. But she's a poet too, and I restrained myself, after pointing it out to her. I hope she squirrels it away for later use. Happy accidents like that don't happen very often.
Or maybe they do, if you're listening for them. I've been riding the bus back and forth to CNR since it's a straight shot down Westchester Ave. from my place. A lot of kids of all ages ride the bus, too, and if you're a language junkie, kids are where the verbal mescalin and speedballs are. The neologisms alone, some as ephemeral as mayflies, are worth putting up with the hormonal teenage noise. But it's the little kids who come up with the metaphoric gems. One little boy, who insisted on sitting in his seat completely upside down, regaled his mother with a litany of metaphors so stunning (and so exasperating and tiring to her, poor bun) that I had to get out my notebook to write some of them down. Here's a couple: The sky is a sweater. The earth is a gun. These followed by "Mommy, I'm too much." And he was. If only he knew how he was too much. It was a spoken word jazz improv and the kid was freebasing language.
That kind of language is infectious (unless you're a tired mom with a hyperactive kid). And you only hear it if you listen carefully to everyday life. The sanitized language of TV doesn' t have it. And when I say sanitized, I mean it. Think we don't have censorship in this country? Try saying fuck—a word so overused it has all but completely lost its shock value—on network TV. There are few regional accents, not much slang, and no poetry. Listening to American and British newscasters, you'd think we were all one. Not hardly. Even Midwesterners are not all one.
I've forgotten how strong that Michigan/Ohio/Indiana/Wisconsin accent can be; only a visit from my cousins recently reminded me. Their round vowels kept blinking "not from here." Stay in one place long enough, no matter how different from your own, and the language starts to rub off on you. Certainly the local lingo does. I now call carbonated soft drinks "soda" instead of "pop" while I'm standing "on" line instead of "in" line. (Perhaps this is why New Yorker's queue up so badly while waiting for the bus: nobody can find the invisible line we're supposed to be standing on.) I have also learned to speak Starbuckian while here, though not through any real effort, just out of repetition and necessity. The natives don't understand you otherwise. And apparently, I have lost my accent, such as it was.
My English friend Helen, who lived in the States for a long time while pursuing a doctorate, lost a great deal of her plummy accent while she was over here and sounded almost American. Having been back home for a good 20 years now, though, her clipped, Oxbridgian accent is thick enough to spread on a muffin. And her grammar is far more precise and exacting (and British) than mine will ever be (for which I am secretly grateful).
But knowing how a language sounds can save you more than grammar grief. It teaches you to spell. One of the most useful things I ever learned, besides how to diagram sentences, was phonics, and how to break words up into syllables. If you know the sounds of the phonemes, what a morpheme is, and where to break a syllable, you're pretty much set.
Or so you'd think. Maybe I'm just a word junkie. There was a really fascinating discussion on my flist at LJ (friends locked, so I can't give you the link) where I contributed something about intuitive learning. Someone replied that although she read a lot, this had never worked her. Which, of course, it doesn't, and I'm just extrapolating my experience onto others. Bad me, no biscuit. I think it's being a word junkie that made me more attuned to how language works, both in writing and spoken forms. I've always loved the sound of words. Some of them almost have texture to me, or color or flavor. I have a definite preference for what I think of as "hard" consonants, especially K and G and T, and though I like the word fricative as a word the sounds defined as such don't do much for me. I like knowing the etymology of words, and knowing what their roots mean in the language we stole them from (usually Greek or Latin), which makes it easier to parse out the meaning of similar words, e.g. photon, photography, and photosynthesis all have to do with light. But I don't think learning to listen or to read well hurts either.
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