With its long-established role of global lingua franca, today the majority of the 1.5 billion English speakers worldwide are so-called ‘non-natives’. The native-nonnative binary is widely used by linguists and laypeople alike as a way to categorise oneself and others, however “nativeness constitutes a non-elective socially constructed identity rather than a linguistic category” (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001, 100), and appears at times insufficient or imprecise in the classification of people (e.g. multilingual individuals). Non-nativeness is mainly revealed though spoken language, especially through accent. The term ‘accent’ bears multiple meanings: in popular discourse, it is frequently used interchangeably with ‘dialect’, ‘pronunciation’, or ‘fluency’, and as it also transmits relevant information about a person’s identity (geographic origin, social class), it carries great symbolic value (Moyer 2013). It is virtually impossible not to have any accent, in particular when learning a second language; however, developing a ‘native-like’ accent is too often taken as the highest level of language proficiency, and as the goal language learners must strive to reach. The term "native-speakerism" (Holliday 2018) has been coined to describe the phenomenon of according superiority to the “native speaker brand” over L2 speakers. In the past few years, the distinction between native and non-native speakers of English has become increasingly charged with meaning. With English being a strong symbol of national identity for Britons, multilingualism is now seen as a ‘transitory’ phenomenon (Conteh and Brock 2011) towards the goal of substituting one’s native language with English. In this frame, the necessity to display a ‘native’ accent seems to mix with the ‘monolingual speaker ideal’ (Moyer 2013). This study aims to reconstruct what it means to be perceived as ‘native’ versus ‘non-native’ speakers of English from a linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view, through a review of the literature on the attitudes towards English spoken with a non-native accent, and subsequently through surveys conducted on British citizens. The review was conducted to ascertain the way in which accent is described and defined within language attitudes research (Dragojevic et al. 2021). The present contribution describes the results of the review of 729 articles obtained through three digital libraries of academic journals (JSTOR, Wiley Online and ScienceDirect). The search results were filtered so that they must be in English, include the keyword ‘attitude’ in the title (either of the article or the publication) and the terms ‘accent’ or ‘speech’ and ‘foreign’ or ‘non-native’ in the body of the article. Whenever allowed by the websites’ features, the research was limited to the subject areas of ‘Language & Linguistics’, ‘Language teaching & learning’, ‘Language & literature’, ‘Social Sciences’, ‘Psychology’, and ‘Arts and Humanities’. The total before this selection was of 2510. The results were then filtered to exclude duplicates (144), articles that did not adhere to the parameters set (51) and reviews (11), for a total of 523. Afterwards, due to the large amount of items, they were further filtered by eliminating those that were published before 1960 (19). The date was chosen by taking into account the history of the field of language attitudes research, using the year of the introduction of Lambert et al.’s matched guise technique as a benchmark (see Dragojevic et al. 2021). The remaining 504 articles were filtered once again by selecting only those that contained at least one of the keywords other than ‘attitude’ (accent, speech, foreign, non-native) in the title; this was due to the high number of results containing the keyword ‘attitude’ but pertaining to unrelated fields. The articles were then filtered by hand to only consider those that were pertinent to research on language attitudes towards foreign accents, for a total of 29 remaining. Of those, three were unavailable and fifteen, while on topic, did not study the attitudes of nonnative-accented English (9 studied attitudes towards foreign-accented languages other than English, and 6 studied the attitudes towards native-accented varieties of English; neither were judged to be pertinent to the research at hand). To the eleven articles remaining, three more (adhering to the same criteria described thus far) were added manually: the three originate from another review of a broader selection of articles currently underway. The final fourteen articles all studied the attitudes of either native or non-native English speakers towards English spoken with non-native accents; the studies involve a variety of different accents, mostly from Asia, and in the majority of cases were performed by the use of the verbal guise technique. The articles were analysed on the basis of three parameters: accurate description of the input speaker, description of the speakers’ accent strength, and distinction made between accent as ‘perceptibly foreign’ and accent as ‘unintelligible’. The notion of intelligibility, i.e. that “a foreign accent is unimportant as long as the intended message is clear” (Moyer 2013, 92), is directly opposed to the ‘native speaker model’ and could be a more reasonable goal for L2 learners than a ‘native-like’ accent; it is directly correlated to accent strength, since a broader accent might impact pronunciation and comprehension. Of the fourteen articles observed, only five gave a satisfactory phonological description of the speaker’s accent, and only one addressed its strength. Half of them offered their raters the possibility to evaluate the speakers’ accent on the basis of intelligibility, but only a few expanded on this characteristic. The results of this review show that the parameters of intelligibility and especially degree of accent strength are especially underrepresented in language attitudes research. Since accent is inherently variable, as there are “no two members of the same speech community sound exactly alike” (ibid., 10), information about what exactly is defined in research as ‘having an accent’ would be invaluable to break away from the native-nonnative binary. In a later stage of this research, questionnaires and recorded interviews will be used to observe several features of spoken language, including pronunciation, intonation, grammar structures and vocabulary selection, in order to illustrate how language is used to construct and negotiate the identity of an English ‘native’ speaker against those speakers who are thought to reveal their otherness.

Excuse my English - building and negotiating an English native-speaker identity / Cigliano, Chiara; Donadio, Paolo. - (2023), pp. 243-245. (Intervento presentato al convegno Languaging diversity international conference 2023 tenutosi a Torino nel 14-16 Dicembre 2023).

Excuse my English - building and negotiating an English native-speaker identity

Chiara Cigliano
Primo
;
Paolo Donadio
Secondo
Supervision
2023

Abstract

With its long-established role of global lingua franca, today the majority of the 1.5 billion English speakers worldwide are so-called ‘non-natives’. The native-nonnative binary is widely used by linguists and laypeople alike as a way to categorise oneself and others, however “nativeness constitutes a non-elective socially constructed identity rather than a linguistic category” (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001, 100), and appears at times insufficient or imprecise in the classification of people (e.g. multilingual individuals). Non-nativeness is mainly revealed though spoken language, especially through accent. The term ‘accent’ bears multiple meanings: in popular discourse, it is frequently used interchangeably with ‘dialect’, ‘pronunciation’, or ‘fluency’, and as it also transmits relevant information about a person’s identity (geographic origin, social class), it carries great symbolic value (Moyer 2013). It is virtually impossible not to have any accent, in particular when learning a second language; however, developing a ‘native-like’ accent is too often taken as the highest level of language proficiency, and as the goal language learners must strive to reach. The term "native-speakerism" (Holliday 2018) has been coined to describe the phenomenon of according superiority to the “native speaker brand” over L2 speakers. In the past few years, the distinction between native and non-native speakers of English has become increasingly charged with meaning. With English being a strong symbol of national identity for Britons, multilingualism is now seen as a ‘transitory’ phenomenon (Conteh and Brock 2011) towards the goal of substituting one’s native language with English. In this frame, the necessity to display a ‘native’ accent seems to mix with the ‘monolingual speaker ideal’ (Moyer 2013). This study aims to reconstruct what it means to be perceived as ‘native’ versus ‘non-native’ speakers of English from a linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view, through a review of the literature on the attitudes towards English spoken with a non-native accent, and subsequently through surveys conducted on British citizens. The review was conducted to ascertain the way in which accent is described and defined within language attitudes research (Dragojevic et al. 2021). The present contribution describes the results of the review of 729 articles obtained through three digital libraries of academic journals (JSTOR, Wiley Online and ScienceDirect). The search results were filtered so that they must be in English, include the keyword ‘attitude’ in the title (either of the article or the publication) and the terms ‘accent’ or ‘speech’ and ‘foreign’ or ‘non-native’ in the body of the article. Whenever allowed by the websites’ features, the research was limited to the subject areas of ‘Language & Linguistics’, ‘Language teaching & learning’, ‘Language & literature’, ‘Social Sciences’, ‘Psychology’, and ‘Arts and Humanities’. The total before this selection was of 2510. The results were then filtered to exclude duplicates (144), articles that did not adhere to the parameters set (51) and reviews (11), for a total of 523. Afterwards, due to the large amount of items, they were further filtered by eliminating those that were published before 1960 (19). The date was chosen by taking into account the history of the field of language attitudes research, using the year of the introduction of Lambert et al.’s matched guise technique as a benchmark (see Dragojevic et al. 2021). The remaining 504 articles were filtered once again by selecting only those that contained at least one of the keywords other than ‘attitude’ (accent, speech, foreign, non-native) in the title; this was due to the high number of results containing the keyword ‘attitude’ but pertaining to unrelated fields. The articles were then filtered by hand to only consider those that were pertinent to research on language attitudes towards foreign accents, for a total of 29 remaining. Of those, three were unavailable and fifteen, while on topic, did not study the attitudes of nonnative-accented English (9 studied attitudes towards foreign-accented languages other than English, and 6 studied the attitudes towards native-accented varieties of English; neither were judged to be pertinent to the research at hand). To the eleven articles remaining, three more (adhering to the same criteria described thus far) were added manually: the three originate from another review of a broader selection of articles currently underway. The final fourteen articles all studied the attitudes of either native or non-native English speakers towards English spoken with non-native accents; the studies involve a variety of different accents, mostly from Asia, and in the majority of cases were performed by the use of the verbal guise technique. The articles were analysed on the basis of three parameters: accurate description of the input speaker, description of the speakers’ accent strength, and distinction made between accent as ‘perceptibly foreign’ and accent as ‘unintelligible’. The notion of intelligibility, i.e. that “a foreign accent is unimportant as long as the intended message is clear” (Moyer 2013, 92), is directly opposed to the ‘native speaker model’ and could be a more reasonable goal for L2 learners than a ‘native-like’ accent; it is directly correlated to accent strength, since a broader accent might impact pronunciation and comprehension. Of the fourteen articles observed, only five gave a satisfactory phonological description of the speaker’s accent, and only one addressed its strength. Half of them offered their raters the possibility to evaluate the speakers’ accent on the basis of intelligibility, but only a few expanded on this characteristic. The results of this review show that the parameters of intelligibility and especially degree of accent strength are especially underrepresented in language attitudes research. Since accent is inherently variable, as there are “no two members of the same speech community sound exactly alike” (ibid., 10), information about what exactly is defined in research as ‘having an accent’ would be invaluable to break away from the native-nonnative binary. In a later stage of this research, questionnaires and recorded interviews will be used to observe several features of spoken language, including pronunciation, intonation, grammar structures and vocabulary selection, in order to illustrate how language is used to construct and negotiate the identity of an English ‘native’ speaker against those speakers who are thought to reveal their otherness.
2023
9788875902803
Excuse my English - building and negotiating an English native-speaker identity / Cigliano, Chiara; Donadio, Paolo. - (2023), pp. 243-245. (Intervento presentato al convegno Languaging diversity international conference 2023 tenutosi a Torino nel 14-16 Dicembre 2023).
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