lysi wrote:rdearman wrote:Accents are on a scale running from unintelligible to native. Cainntear is saying the more you're willing to assume the cultural markers and align your identity to the language, then the further along the scale your accent will move towards native when compared to another person who refuses to align closely with the language.
Aligning your accent to native speakers is not a priori a good thing.
Yes, and it's not a priori a bad thing. That's why we're discussing variables here.
The situation is far from clear when it comes to English, however.
But as I already said, English is in a unique position.
What measures are there for value of an accent? There are objectively none, subjectively many, but they represent far more the biases and prejudices of the one making the judgments than any particular reality.
The reality is that some people are harder to understand, and some people are easier to understand. The fact that there is no precise measure of this doesn't stop that being reality.
And the people who have a stronger non-native accent are harder to understand than the ones with a more native-like accent. This is objective reality that we know to be true, even if we can't measure it quantitatively.
What 'beliefs and customs' are there to be learned from a Lingua Franca?
Most languages are not learned to be used as a lingua franca between non-natives. Increasingly only English is.
What "beliefs and customs" are there to be learned for a German learning English to communicate with other Europeans in some domain of technology?
There are ways of looking at the world encoded in any language. Even if you eliminate idiomatic cliches and proverbs, there are still levels of idiom you cannot eliminate from a language.
As an English speaker, I needed to be acculturated to the levels of politeness used in Spanish, and I would need further acculturation to deal with the system of honorifics in a language like Japan.
A French speaker of English with a French accent isn't going to be stigmatized, far from it, and it represents their identity far more closely than picking a Standard American accent.
But you've skipped over a point I made in my last message. I said:
myself wrote: when you get down to unusual language pairs (eg a Hungarian learner of Basque) the non-natives' accent is not going to be placeable to the people they're talking to, so won't communicate any group membership, but rather non-membership of the main speaker group.
A French accent in English is far from unknown -- it's something a fair percentage of native speakers will have encountered many times during their life. Would you recognise an Uyghur speaker's accent if you were to encounter one speaking English? I know I wouldn't. So how does speaking English with an Uyghur accent express a group identity, and who does it express it to?
Whether an accent is 'useful' is irrelevant.
"Irrelevant" is a strong word, and needs supported.
Is an English accent with the cot-caught merger any less 'useful' than one without? But about accents being an impediment to understanding, a Scottish accent are almost incomprehensible to anybody not familiar with it, and yet it's a native accent. Why would an incomprehensible (to outsiders) non-native accent be any different than this?
Because the non-native speaker of English does not learn English to speak to other speakers of his or her own native language -- that would be a waste of everybody's time.
The non-native speaker of English -- or indeed
any language -- learns it expressly to communicate with people who are
not part of his language community, so needs to learn a comprehensible accent.
The adaptation is the crucial part in this discussion, there needs to be some ability to converge accents with an interlocuter, to speak a more standard English for communication, but asking a German to lose their German accent in English is the same as asking a native English speaker to change their accent: Both are asking them fundamentally to change the representation of their identity.
You know what's a more fundamental marker of identity than accent? Language.
Why is it OK to ask the German to stop using their grammar and their lexis, but not their phonology? I do not see how that makes sense.
And again, how do you speak English in an accent that does not permit the sounds of English?