Grogol

“My father’s from Grogol.”

A blank stare.

“Grogol,” I repeated.

The blank stare continued, now with a slight squint toward the top of my face, as if the meaning of “Grogol” were tattooed in tiny print on my forehead.

“It’s a village in Jakarta,” I offered.

“Ah! Grogol,” the teacher exclaimed. She placed heavy stress on “gol,” pronounced “goal.” Gro. Goooooooooooool. Gro, professional soccer player, scores a goaaaaaaaaaaaaal.

That was a conversation I had with my Indonesian teacher; I’m taking Indonesian this quarter as a heritage speaker. I grew up in an Indonesian-speaking household but have never had formal education in the language, so I basically have the abilities of a little kid. Not even a precocious little kid, like a kid who never read books or grew up in the jungle or something.

I found it interesting that even though I was saying the right word, she didn’t understand me until I gave her more information. Then she repeated the word, correcting, unconsciously or not, my pronunciation.

I thought of this little exchange as I read Kenstowicz. Through his example of allophones under the same phoneme [t], he notes that “we are in general unconscious of these rules. But if we come into contact with a speaker who fails to follow them, we may feel that he or she is not ‘one of us’” (66). It’s fascinating how we could instantly gauge if someone is “one of us” or not just based on complex rules (such as “[come to a] voiceless stop when [you have the] same syllable as the preceding vowel”) that native speakers don’t usually think about (69). My teacher could tell that my speech was foreign from the moment I opened my mouth, even if I boast the self-appointed “Least Obvious American Accent” title among my cousins who also grew up in America.

The idea of language sounding “right” is also discussed by Gussenhoven, who, along with introducing the basic sound system of our bodies, mentions pitch as an indicator of meaning. He gives the example of two sentences – “But I don’t want it!” and “Want it?” – to show how the word that is spoken with a higher pitch lends a declarative or interrogative bent to the sentence. When I read these sentences, I automatically stressed “want” and “it.” Then I tried stressing different words to see how the meanings would change. For example, putting the stress on “want” instead of “it” in “Want it?” places more emphasis on the potential desire rather than the object. Do non-native English speakers place stress on the same words as do native English speakers? Can the difference in stressed words not only change meaning but also signify “otherness”?  Is the “American accent” a result of stressing syllables that native speakers wouldn’t normally stress and not stressing normally stressed syllables, such as in “Grogol”?

I’m looking forward to exploring these questions, as well as improving my Indonesian. These are my Gro-gooooaaaaaaaaaals.