Yes, as Mike says, there are many reasons to 'go native' in speaking a
language.
The point behind my question of WHY? originally was to suggest that it is
mainly the prestige languages, the imperial languages, that people want to
be able to claim 'native like fluency' in, and where, to some extent, this
is encouraged and derided at the same time by native speakers .... who are
flattered at the imitation, and ego-boosted as well to know how well nigh
impossible it is ... as Mike noted. There would seem to be a different set
of implications and value-issues at stake if we ask whether we'd want
native-like fluency in a low-prestige, stigmatized dialect or sociolect,
and what its native speakers would think of our efforts. Even in the case
of Australian, mainly respectable but shading towards stigmatized in its
more colorful varieties (the product of colonial derision by British
language snobs), I've seen that efforts to get native-like in speaking
'Strine are taken as somewhat insulting by dinkum Aussies, and not as
flattering in the same way aspirants to RP are perceived in the UK. And
what if we were learning Cockney? or basolectal African-American?
But Mike notes that there are also assimilationist pressures. I definitely
use British terms and shift a few vowels a degree or two toward
'mid-Atlantic' when I'm there, for many reasons ... optimizing my status,
flattering my hosts, minimizing miscommunication, etc. But I also feel a
counter-balancing pressure: to retain sufficient signs of my Americanness
not to lead people to assume I really am a native and talk to me as if I
were ... which would make communication, and other social practices, more
complicated than I need them to be. Some people might also feel an
attachment to their identification with an American sound; I don't feel
this very strongly, partly from linguistic sophistication, partly from
alienation from my own dominant culture, and mostly I suppose because, as a
speaker of a prestige lect, I have the luxury of not clinging to it as
tightly as someone might who felt they had to defend its value, and their
own, against prejudice.
So there are many ways in which our degree of "nativity" -- not to mention
the particular KIND of nativity -- strikes an uneasy and shifting balance
among the advantages of fluency and the disadvantages of misapprehension.
How we speak, with great subtlety in our first language, and with clunky
repercussions in others, POSITIONS us in the space of heteroglossia, in
social space, and we must be in the RIGHT place as seen by others, which is
not, I think, generally the position of being mistaken for a native
speaker. We do seek, I think, the optimum "profit of distinction", the
highest status lect available to us within the other language, at least if
we aspire to such a social status, or to transfer our home social status to
the new speech community.
I think this gives a useful sociolinguistic twist on the issue often
considered by those who theorize second-language teaching ... what should
the goal be? the target variety? the aspired to level of fluency and
nativity? ... we should recast these questions in terms of acquiring the
ability to linguistically place ourselves in social space WHERE we belong,
or where we wish to be thought to belong. HOW I want to speak a language is
very much about WHO I wish to present myself as in speaking that language.
Of course it is also about WITH WHOM and in what activities I want to
participate ... but from our canonical choices, from our grammars and
teaching materials, we therefore can learn to question why it seems that we
do not want to be able to speak with children, or understand how to place
people socially by their speech, or know how to modify our speech to be
more intelligible to all those people who do not speak the language of the
grammar books. Quite honestly, whom does the grammar and language-teaching
industry serve? whom did it serve historically in setting its norms and
biases? Businessmen, military officers, the diplomatic corps, the
intelligence community, and colonial officialdom. (See for example the
history of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, home of British
grammar-linguistics.) Of course there are other parts of the history (Latin
grammar), but my case is not hard to make.
Yes, the history of language standardization is very much part of the
larger history of standardizations of many other kinds (the French case is
particularly neat). Nationalization. Institutional organization on wider
scales. Control and leverage by being in the center from which standards
are determined. Surveillance and sanction to enforce standards. Etc.
Standard language, standard curriculum, standard weights and measures,
standard coinage, standard taxes, standard military discipline, standard
legal statutes ... ALL dressed up in social functionalism, all rationalized
by their convenience for some of us, all actually useful and maybe to some
degree necessary to organize social systems on a large scale by basically
hierarchical principles and institutions. But all ALSO tools of control,
leverage, privilege, discrimination, and all carried to extremes far beyond
necessity and convenience to maximize the power of the institutions that
promulgate them and the powerful interests they serve.
We COULD have more tolerance for, and indeed appreciate more the value of,
linguistic (especially dialectal and sociolectal) diversity, especially in
institutions of power (education, the media, law, government, business ...)
with only a small loss in convenience and a great gain in social justice
(and in the richness of our mediational means). We COULD teach languages as
heteroglossic, polylectal resources that interact dynamically with social
positioning and social structure. Why we HAVEN'T has a telling history. Why
we DON'T tells us important things about our own society.
Why we AREN'T even trying poses uncomfortable moral questions.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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