What's So Funny About My Accent?

The readings about phonology by Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz evoked reflections of my experience with foreign language whilst abroad in Beijing this summer. I was anxious to acclimate to the Beijing lifestyle, which was hard given how little Mandarin I knew from high school. What’s more is I have always had trouble distinguishing which tone to use and understanding which tone is which in Mandarin. As Gussenhoven noted, some languages like Mandarin are tone languages, and different pitch patterns can differentiate words from one another. If I said “ma” in Mandarin, given it means 5 different things depending on the pitch, I highly doubt anyone would know if I meant horse, mother, to bother, to scold, or was asking a question.

I really resonated with the part of Kenstowicz’s article about linguistic rules we are unconscious of that if not followed, it is clear that the speaker is not one of us. I encountered this phenomenon first-hand when observing a Peking University student listen to a Stanford student. A student from Stanford grew up in America speaking English with friends but also spoke Mandarin at home. Every time this Stanford student talked in Mandarin, one of the native Chinese students from Peking University began to have fits of laughter. To me, someone with low aptitude for speaking and understanding Chinese, it seemed like the Stanford student was just speaking fluent, unaccented Mandarin. However, the Peking University student found the Stanford student’s accent funny beyond belief.

When I asked the Peking University student what was so funny about the Stanford student’s accent when he spoke Chinese, he was at a loss for words. At the time, I was puzzled. How could he think this accent was so funny without being able to describe why? Kenstowicz finally answered my question: the rules that dictate the way we speech are often such that we cannot discover them through introspection. In other words, you learn certain things about a language just by being a native speaker. Seems unfair to people trying to study foreign language...

Though Gussenhoven’s discussion of the biophysical means through which humans create speech and Kenstowicz’s exploration of how native speakers judge sounds to be identical that are phonetically distinct, the authors explain how different languages and dialects vary in the way that they fundamentally produce and utilize speech. For instance, certain sounds used in some languages are absent from others because of the way we physically learn to produce sounds in our native environment. I think these linguistic challenges as described by Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz are the underlying reasons that the native Chinese speaker found the Stanford student’s accent when he spoke Chinese hilarious.