Language Shaming

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reineke
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Language Shaming

Postby reineke » Sat Nov 12, 2016 10:29 pm

Why Are Europeans 'Bad English Shaming' Their Politicians?
English has become the lingua franca of Europe. And politicians who can't speak it well are getting roundly mocked by their own citizens.

"If you stumble or make mistakes when trying to speak a foreign language, spare a thought for Europe’s hapless politicians. Recently, the continent’s political masters have been slapped by a new form of satirical attack—Bad English Shaming. A viral-video sub-trend, Bad English Shaming sees public figures foolhardy enough to let their rusty English be recorded on camera getting mocked and mauled for their poor foreign language skills.

Exhibit A of the trend is an impassioned speech made this month by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Supposedly, it was in English. Renzi’s speech is so halting and garbled it’s hard to understand what he’s actually talking about, though it contains occasional lucid but surreal gems as, “He invent the telephone to speaking about in the theatre." Since then, clips of Renzi’s stumbling performance have gone viral."

Then there were Madrid Mayor Ana Botella’s attempts last year to sell her city as a contender for the Summer Olympics. Mayor Botella’s stilted, halting English made her a national laughing stock, a reputation she has since solidified through gaffe after gaffe. What is telling about the derision for Botella’s efforts is that, from a native speaker’s perspective, they don’t seem too bad. Sure, viewers have to contend with her awful, hokey delivery (“Madrid is FAAAAAN!”) and the tendency to slap a mystery “e” on the start of words, but she still puts the average Brit’s Paella ‘n’ chips Spanish to shame. In Spain, however, the speech seems to have half the nation holding their sides. Botella will probably be Ms. Café con Leche until the end of her days now.

doubt she’ll speak English in public again, but for European public figures today, even that won’t necessarily spare you. In 2009, Germany’s then-foreign-minister Guido Westerwelle was lampooned just for refusing to answer a question in English. Admittedly, I see the point here. Westerwelle’s brief was international, and with his mixture of oiliness and awkwardness, his spikiness was always destined to attract notice.

There’s a striking connection between these three little spats: The ridicule all came not from native English speakers, but from the politicians’ own compatriots.

It has not been ever thus. Francois Mitterrand’s exceedingly brief 1986 foray into English at the Statue of Liberty’s centenary celebrations was widely taken as a badge of skillful statesmanship. Looking back a few decades further, it was once possible for Italian and French singers to make garbled English-sounding noises that passed among many of their monolingual listeners as the real thing, a style known as "singing in yogurt." Meanwhile, British pop singers who wanted to succeed in Europe often had to translate their songs to have a hope of cracking the market..."

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/07/why-are-europeans-bad-english-shaming-their-politicians/374922/

LET’S BE COOL ABOUT ENGLISH

"With English serving as a global lingua franca, it’s easy to see the ill fit when a minority of English speakers (those who speak it by accident of birth) exercise disproportionate control over what should be regarded as acceptable English. In scientific publishing, for example, authors using English as a lingua franca (ELF) encounter linguistic gatekeepers who not infrequently insist on “native-like” English as a criteria for publishing. Yet, attitudes are changing just as quickly as anything else in our single-click world. Even native speakers of English can see that we need to be cool about English.

In an article this month in Slate, Boer Deng, herself a second-language user of English, has an interesting take on English as the scientific lingua franca. She argues that the English supremacy in academia is linked to American spending on and production of PhDs, which has exploded since the 1960s. She further points out the added challenges of representing one’s self as a professional without the advantage of using your first language. As a result, native speakers of English should show more understanding and consideration toward their peers – in short, we need to be cool.

But how to implement this linguistic coolness institutionally? Deng cites the example of an American journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell, which published an editorial in 2012 (read it here) that calls for flexibility by reviewers when evaluating scientific texts by authors using English as a second or foreign language."

https://elfaproject.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/lets-be-cool-about-english/
Last edited by reineke on Wed Mar 08, 2017 10:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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LadyGrey1986
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Re: Bad English Shaming

Postby LadyGrey1986 » Sat Nov 12, 2016 10:44 pm

The opposite also happens. Frans Timmermans, former Dutch minister of foreign affairs, speaks seven languages fluently. He is often mocked because of his "fake upper-class pretentious British accent" and as someone who has nothing of substance to say in all of his languages. In short: he is accused of bragging.

You can see him in action here:



In this link, you can hear his English



In this newspaper article, Alison Edwards (an Australian linguist, who has written a PHD on the subject of "Dutch" English) goes as far to call him a total freak.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/03/09/ne ... 05-a880726
Last edited by LadyGrey1986 on Sun Nov 13, 2016 11:54 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Bad English Shaming

Postby klvik » Sat Nov 12, 2016 11:27 pm

reineke wrote:Why Are Europeans 'Bad English Shaming' Their Politicians?
English has become the lingua franca of Europe. And politicians who can't speak it well are getting roundly mocked by their own citizens.

In an article this month in Slate, Boer Deng, herself a second-language user of English, has an interesting take on English as the scientific lingua franca. She argues that the English supremacy in academia is linked to American spending on and production of PhDs, which has exploded since the 1960s. She further points out the added challenges of representing one’s self as a professional without the advantage of using your first language. As a result, native speakers of English should show more understanding and consideration toward their peers – in short, we need to be cool.

But how to implement this linguistic coolness institutionally? Deng cites the example of an American journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell, which published an editorial in 2012 (read it here) that calls for flexibility by reviewers when evaluating scientific texts by authors using English as a second or foreign language."

https://elfaproject.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/lets-be-cool-about-english/


To be clear, the MBC editorial does not recommend publishing poorly written manuscripts or those with grammatical errors. It reminds reviewers that they should base their review on the science and it reminds authors that their writing must be clear enough that the reviewers can evaluate the science without confusion. When submitting a manuscript review, most scientists differentiate between scientific issues that must be addressed and re-reviewed before the manuscript can be considered acceptable for publication and problems (such as grammatical errors) that can be worked out between the author and the editorial staff. When I evaluate manuscripts I include a list of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in my review, but these comments always fall into the latter category.
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Re: Bad English Shaming

Postby Longinus » Sat Nov 12, 2016 11:42 pm

Likewise, I also review papers for several scientific journals. I never comment on the English, unless it's so bad that I can't understand what they're saying. The journal employs a copy editor to fix the grammatical and spelling errors, it's not my job. I just comment on the science.

That being said, it is not uncommon to review a paper which contains several paragraphs of unintelligible gibberish. Also, I get to see the reviews by other reviewers, and some of them do tend to get caught up in trivialities, like fixing the grammar and spelling. Typically, these types of reviewers will then not notice major methodological flaws, so it can be rather amusing. What I don't know is the name of the other reviewer, so I don't know if their native language is English!

Most English speakers are used to hearing all sorts of strange accents and syntax, and I think we're pretty tolerant as a result. I also have encountered this phenomenon of non-native speakers making fun of other non-native speakers' English, and I find it very strange.
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Re: Bad English Shaming

Postby LadyGrey1986 » Sun Nov 13, 2016 12:12 am

Exhibit B: the Dutch ridicule prime minister Rutte's English. He appearently said "you are true" to president Obama instead of "you are right".

English teacher Bart Ongering tweeted that one of his pupils suggested mr Rutte should join his class.

http://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2014/0 ... s_english/
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Re: Bad English Shaming

Postby Random Review » Mon Nov 14, 2016 1:41 am

Ufff the Ana Botella story brings back memories. I was in my first year teaching in Spain either late 2014 or very early 2015 and two of my classes independently mentioned that, expecting I'd laugh at her with them. I desperately wanted my classes to like me and remember scrambling to try and find something ridiculous in what they were telling me she had said. IIRC they seemed to find her saying "a relaxing cup of café con leche in the Plaza Mayor" to be horrendous, but to me it sounded fine.

I'm still not even clear on why this was bad TBH. I think most native English speakers would refer to the Plaza Mayor in Madrid as the Plaza Mayor and not the main square, certainly every single one of the anglophones I knew in Madrid referred to it as that. Café con leche is not something a native anglophone would be likely to say (in English), but it makes perfect sense in someone trying to sell Spain and Madrid*. We are all familiar enough with 'café au lait' or 'caffe latte' and how these words evoke Paris or Florence or Rome, etc; why can't she be allowed to be creative like that too?

Anyway, I pretended it sounded horrendous, coward that I am. I think I even managed to convince myself for a while.

* Off topic but in general the coffee in Madrid is surprisingly bad, I personally probably wouldn't try to sell the city with that, although in a city that size obviously there are places you can get a good coffee if you know where to look.
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Re: Bad English Shaming

Postby William Camden » Mon Nov 14, 2016 11:25 am

Tayyip Erdoğan speaks virtually no English at all, his "one minute" to Shimon Peres at Davos years ago probably tested his linguistic limits. I doubt whether it harmed his links to his political base, indeed a knowledge of English these days may even be considered politically suspect in Turkey.
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Re: Bad English Shaming

Postby FyrsteSumarenINoreg » Wed Nov 16, 2016 10:26 pm

Longinus wrote:
Most English speakers are used to hearing all sorts of strange accents and syntax, and I think we're pretty tolerant as a result.

Yeah right. :roll:
I have not heard French or Germans shaming Melania Trump's English.
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Re: Language Shaming

Postby reineke » Wed Mar 08, 2017 10:38 pm

B is for Bad language learner

"As a precaution against the recent hurricane that threatened his city, the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, “issued warnings and press statements, often in basic, un-accented [sic] Spanish”. This prompted a Spanish-speaking New York resident to launch a Twitter feed that caricatured the Mayor’s “broken Spanish”. “The feed soon went viral and has attracted a large online following” (according to the BBC’s website).

As a second language user myself, and as a language teacher, teacher trainer and methodology writer, it offends me when anyone who attempts to communicate in a language that is not their own (whether they be mayor, football coach, actor, ex-pat, or student) is mocked in this way. However ‘bad’ his Spanish is, surely the mayor should be congratulated, not caricatured?

I tweeted to this effect – that I didn’t find it particularly funny, and that this seemed to be a case of ‘damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t’. However, a fellow tweeter in Brazil, Higor Cavalcante, went so far as to blog his disagreement, arguing that, as mayor of a city with a large Hispanic population “Mr. Bloomberg has the obligation to speak excellent Spanish”. (Not to mention Chinese, Greek, Yiddish and Korean either, I suppose).

Excellent Spanish. Not just good, or passable, but excellent.

I suspect Higor is a good language learner. He certainly writes beautifully in English. But maybe Mayor Bloomberg is not a good language learner. I’m sure he would love to be able to speak excellent Spanish, but maybe for him excellence comes at a cost – a cost that even his billions can’t meet. Yet should he be penalised for trying?

Good language learners often find it difficult to understand what it’s like to be a bad language learner. They think you can just flip a switch and out it flows. As a bad language learner myself, I run up against this constantly.

Ok, I said it. I am a bad language learner. I am a bad language learner for a variety of reasons, biographical, psychological and maybe even physiological (I have terrible ‘phonemic coding ability’ – maybe related to the fact that I can’t sing in tune either!).

It’s not that I haven’t tried. I’ve been to classes, I’ve done conversation exchanges, I’ve studied the grammar, I’ve memorised lists of words, and I read five to ten thousand words of Spanish daily. Yet I’m still barely B2-ish, speaking-wise, exacerbated by an uncompromising anglo accent.

But I get by...

I’ll always sound like a guiri (or gringo) but I can live with that, despite the scorn heaped on me by other, more proficient Spanish speakers. (Once a Californian woman, on hearing me speak, held up her arms in the shape of a cross, as if to ward off evil spirits). As I said, good language learners seem to think that anyone can learn a language to C2 level in a matter of months – and that the failure to do so betrays some moral weakness. But for us drones, it will take years and years, and we may still never get beyond B2 (or even A2 for that matter). However, we shouldn’t be discouraged from trying. Mockery doesn’t help. Nor the implication that our lack of success is a moral failing..."

https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/20 ... e-learner/
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Re: Language Shaming

Postby rdearman » Thu Mar 09, 2017 6:45 am

Two cheers for Scott Thornbury. :D
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