Accents Foreign

My son was about five years old when we took him to his first foreign country: in this case, the French speaking island of Guadalupe. A few days before we were to depart, we were sitting around the kitchen table trying to explain to him the concept of a foreign language. 

     The French, we told him, had a different word for everything. Instead of "water," for instance, they say "l'eau," and instead of butter, "buerre." 

     "Got it," said Jake, and he held up the pepper grinder. "Instead of 'pepper' they say 'peh,' and instead of 'salt,' they say 'sah.'" 

     Like his mother, Jake turned out to have a knack for picking up languages, which requires an ironclad memory with a willingness to look at least temporarily foolish. But all I got was the accent. 
     I'm pretty good at accents: terrible at picking up actual languages, but good at accents. This means that though I remember very few words in, say, the French I studied in high school, I can pronounce them with admirable accuracy. One of my French teachers was so wowed by my accent that she forgave my entire lack of vocabulary. 
     The problem with my excellent pronunciation is that once I have said my little piece, the native speakers with whom I'm conversing conclude that I must know the language as well as I pronounce it, and reciprocate with an avalanche of French. 
     I recognize that a multiplicity of languages has made for a world of richness and complexity, and that there are things you can say in one language that you can't quite say in your own. But the existence of any other language but my own seems as gratuitous a barrier as a jealously guarded national boundary: a hinderance to international comity and literary give-and-take. 
      Study another language for years, and you will still sound, to a native speaker, like a not very bright child. Study it for a year, and you might rise to the level of a shy, socially awkward five year-old. This seems a poor bargain to strike: a year of hard work only to regress to near infancy. And for what? So I can mingle with a lot of foreigners? 
     I have an American friend who has lived in Italy for the past forty years or so, speaking nothing but Italian. Despite a vast vocabulary and a perfect willingness to play the fool, he nonetheless speaks the language in such a way that his Italian-born teenaged daughter must issue corrections and make excuses for him. He reports that he has gotten used to this humiliation, but sometimes it makes him feel lonely.  
      The British understood that speaking with a bad accent not only alerts native speakers to your faulty grasp of their language, it also keeps the ball in their court. By speaking, say, Urdu, with a British accent, mangling the consonants and braying the vowels, they reminded their imperial subjects that an Englishman was an Englishman no matter where he might alight, and it was up to the rest of the world to make sense of him, and not the other way around. And yet mangling subject peoples' language is a tool of colonialism that historians have entirely ignored.
      My daughter and her husband speak a lot of Spanish to their toddler daughter, whose paternal grandparents are Mexican-American. I had hoped I might learn Spanish at the same rate she learns it, but it's not as though she's going to add a word a day to her vocabulary, and teach them piecemeal to her grandfather. Day by day, she is internalizing the language, and one day she's simply going to start speaking Spanish and crush her grandfather -- this grandfather, anyway -- under a foreign tongue.