Having lived in India just long enough to pick up a slight accent before moving to an international school in Singapore, my voice is a baffling mix of British pronunciation, American speech patterns and Indian inflection. On the one hand, this means that no matter which country’s Siri I use, I am never understood correctly, but on the other hand it means I’ve been able to see that that the massive variations between English speakers do not hinder communication.
Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz both allude to this in their pieces, although they focus more on the physical mechanism that direct these differences in voice.
Given that vocalisation is our principle mode of communication, I find it remarkable that as Gussenhoven tells us, we have no organs devoted specifically to the production of sound. This surprise clearly comes from my ill-founded belief that evolution prioritises through the mechanism of assigning entire organs, but it is counterintuitive that speech seems to be a secondary issue for much of our body. His discussion of how most languages use mostly pulmonary egressive sounds was interesting as I wondered how such a universal principle came to be. My hypotheses are that pulmonary egressive speech is the most flexible in terms of the sounds it can make, or simply that they’re the easiest sounds to make.
Two points of interest for me were firstly his conversation of how intonation patterns to communicate intention are universal to a certain subset of languages, whereas in others, intonation communicates meaning. This difference is why if I hear my parents speaking Hindi, I can tell when they’re asking each other a question or exclaiming something but if I hear two people in Singapore speaking Korean, I cannot draw those same conclusions. Secondly, I found it fascinating how the sound we make is so ingrained in the physical motion of our bodies - the physical interaction between our tongues and the roofs of our mouth, or the opening and closing of the glottis - and how even a small change in those aspects can entirely change how we sound. I experimented with this, saying different words while modifying the shape my lips made or the motion my tongue made and very quickly, it became impossible to decipher what I was saying.
Kenstowicz’s discussion of the Singaporean dialect of English - commonly referred to Singlish - was quite amusing to me as it was the first time I saw a formal analysis of a dialect I have been exposed to for much of my life. That said, I haven’t grasped all the nuance of the dialect and so when I attempt to speak it to a Singaporean, I am always outed within a few seconds. This is reminisceient of the idea that it is easy to tell that someone is a non-native speaker by looking at the speech patterns they do not follow and I thought it was interesting that this not only applies to different languages, but also different dialects of the same language.
I found your post quite interesting because I feel I can relate to a lot of the things that you say. In particular, your last point about speech patterns being a tell of non-nativeness is especially pertinent to my own experiences. I was born in New York and grew up in a bunch of different English speaking places--Atlanta, New Jersey, Chicago, Canada, and New Mexico. No matter where I've lived, I've always received the "So you're not from around here, huh?" soon after I meet people for the first time.
ReplyDeleteI've actually also visited Singapore before and found it quite cool that the country has four official languages. I'm sure you've experienced a bunch of linguistic phenomena that we'll soon learn about in class.
Lastly, I want to comment on the point you brought up about evolution and our vocal mechanism. I, too, was a bit shocked to discover that there were no devoted organs to speech production. I spent around five minutes Googling around to see if there were any answers to this, and I did come across something that might shed a little light on the mystery. As important as communication is to us, it is indeed hard to consider speech a "secondary issue", as you mention. According to the readings, speech was technically set aside for feeding and breathing, definitely more important for living than communication. In addition, from my little research, I also discovered that, for most of the first mammals, producing speech would have been mutually exclusive from eating and feeding. Again, seems to make sense to me!
I would like to comment on the point you both brought up about evolution and our vocal mechanism. I agree that for humans, feeding and breathing are more important for survival than communication is. However, think about prairie dogs. They have different alarm calls for different species of predators and therefore use speech to communicate danger. Hence, speech for them is relevant to their survival and I think it would be considered a favorable trait in natural selection and not merely a spandrel. What do you think?
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