The distinguished Swedish linguistic scientist Prof Östen Dahl once wrote that, when it comes to language-learning, “human children have an advantage compared to adult members of their own species”.
The point is that human beings are genetically programmed to learn perfectly any language they are sufficiently exposed to in early childhood, while it is an extraordinary adult who is capable of doing the same thing.
This is particularly obviously true when it comes to pronunciation. Virtually everybody who starts learning a language after the age of eight or so ends up with a non-native accent. But there are advantages to this. It can be helpful if you are a foreigner to sound like one.
A young woman I knew who had been born in England to Polish refugee parents, and had grown up in Britain bilingual in English and Polish, reported that she experienced severe difficulties when she first moved to Poland to take up a job there. Polish people in Warsaw could tell from her accent that Polish was her mother tongue, so they therefore quite rapidly came to the conclusion she was crazy or stupid because she did not know how to do all the many Polish things which any adult Pole would know how to do.
During the act of speaking, our pronunciation depends on millimetre-accurate movements of our tongue and lips, and millisecond-accurate synchronisations of these with the movements of our vocal cords. We learn how to do this as very small infants by mimicking precisely the speech sounds of those around us.
Since these acts of speaking involve producing individual speech sounds thousands of times a day, these movements eventually become deeply automatic and hardwired in the infant, and they are therefore extremely hard to override later on, thus leading to foreign accents in adolescent and adult learners. There is lots of individual variation here, but most people lose the innate ability they had as infants between the ages of, say, eight and 14.
There are rare exceptions: the late Robert Maxwell – millionaire, media proprietor, MP, crook – who was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch – sounded remarkably like an Englishman when he spoke, even though he grew up in eastern Europe speaking Yiddish as his mother tongue, and started learning English only at the age of 17 (see TNE 233). But for the vast majority of us, this degree of achievement is impossible.
This raises an interesting question: is there any point in a non-native learner trying to sound like a native speaker, given that they are never going to succeed? I would say that the more you try to acquire a native-like accent, the nearer you will get to that goal – which will generally make it easier for native speakers to understand you. But of course it may not necessarily make you more intelligible to non-native speakers: a Greek friend of mine claims that he always enjoys visiting Italy because he can so readily understand the English spoken by Italians – and, equally, they can understand him easily, too.
It is also of course the case that native speakers tend to speak more rapidly than non-natives – they have normally, after all, had a lot more practice! – and speed can also cause comprehension difficulties for listeners.
REFUGEE
The term refugee was originally restricted to French Protestants who had fled from France seeking protection from Catholic religious persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries, but of course it now applies to anyone seeking refuge from danger. The word came originally from classical Latin refugium “place of shelter”, ultimately from refugere “to turn back and flee”.
