Growing Up Bilingual

As a child, when I would speak Hindi, my mother tongue, to my family in front of native English speakers in Portland, my birthplace, I would frequently wonder how my language sounded to them. Did it sound like gibberish? Did some words sound similar to English and somehow make sense? Was my tone and pitch enough to get the gist of what I was saying?

While reading Gussenhoven’s article and understanding the various ways humans use our organs of speech consisting of the lungs, larynx and vocal tract, I noticed how language is so pertinent to producing speech.  Gussenhoven states how the pitch, or variation in the number of times the vocal folds open and close, gives a sentence different meanings in languages like English, French, German and Spanish. However, in tonal languages, which consist primarily of East Asian languages like Vietnamese and Thai, different pitch patterns are used in the same way as vowels and consonants are used in all languages. So, when a native English speaker hears Thai, it is understandable if they are confused by the variation of pitch, are unable to grasp the importance of it and thus, are unable to understand the language and its nuances. Guessenhoven also discusses clicks – a sound commonly and to a large extent only used in southern African language. For English-speaking people, even making this unfamiliar sound may be more difficult than for those who use it more regularly. Similarly, Gussenhoven explains the physical interaction of tongues and the roof of our mouths in producing a retroflex – a sound very common in Hindi like in words “thanda” meaning cold and “ghanta” meaning hour.

Kenstowicz states that such retroflex stops have a limited distribution in English and only occur before [r]. According to Kenstowicz, phonetic representation relies on language-particular rules supplying predictable feature specifications on the basis of context. He notes that native speakers judge sounds so identically even though they may be clearly distinct phonetically; [t] has eight variants, which are modified based on context and follow English-particular “rules”. Though such rules may not seem concrete, if one comes into contact with a speaker not following such rules, one might identify this speaker as not “one of us” or with an accent. This observation by Kenstowicz was very interesting for me as it explains humans’ natural preference for homogeneity at the level of linguistics. One such rule of English is the omission of [t] and [d] in the words tents and tends, which are two different words (and are distinct phonetically) despite sounding the same, and thus are labeled as “collective phonetic illusions”. I have noticed that native Hindi speakers do not tend to follow this rule of English because "tents" and "tends" using the Hindi alphabet would be spelt the same. Thus, Hindi speakers may often seem to have an accent to native English speakers. This made me question how do we learn to follow such rules? And, by adopting rules of another language like English, despite being a native Hindi speaker, because of growing up in an English speaking country, is this indicative of my natural tendency to conformity?