I beg your indulgence to air some thoughts that have been brewing in my distracted globe...
As I may have mentioned, I chatted with a local named Mark on my first night here in Bath, and naturally one of things we talked about was language. If you act like a normal tourist (go on tour buses, read your guidebooks, listen to the audioguide and don't talk to the locals), you can almost imagine that you haven't left home at all, as long as you remember that "rubbish" is "trash" and that sort of thing. If you're like me, though, you much prefer to talk to people than listen to a recording, so the language issue becomes unavoidable.
In the musical "My Fair Lady," Henry Higgins sings of dialects, "The moment [an Englishman] talks, he makes some other Englishman despise him," right after he's demonstrated his prowess at guessing where someone is from just from a few words and expresses his disgust for dialects such as those of Yorkshire or Cornwall. I was always told that I would love this movie because it's all about linguistics (sociolinguistics and phonetics, really), but I, like most people, find Higgins insufferable. It's not just that he's arrogant and insensitive, but his elitist attitude about language--particularly the educated dialect he speaks, which, by random coincidences and freak chances having nothing to do with any sort of inherent merit the language, has become prestigious--is painfully and inexcusably wrong. (Diagram that sentence, I dare you.) Linguists now are carefully trained to parrot on command that there is nothing in any particular language that makes it better or worse than another by any absolute-truth sort of measure. According to personal taste, a language can be more or less beautiful than other, and there are most certainly grades of social prestige and importance. But every language is fundamentally arbitrary; what matters is the communication.
Being here, it's impossible to ignore the gradients of social prestige encoded in the language. Despite my aforementioned tolerance training and my disdain for Henry Higgins' supercilious attitude, walking down the sidewalk in touristy Bath, I draw instant conclusions about the people around me by their language without even having to see them. If I asked someone on a street corner for directions, I would take directions from someone who sounded British as accurate, while I would take an American's or Australian's directions with a grain of salt. Hearing an American dialect here grates on my ears; we don't sound like we belong here. The only things keeping me from attempting to disguise my accent altogether (and I've already adopted some vocabulary and prosodic patterns to make my own voice less painful to my ears) are that (1) my pronunciation and cultural knowledge aren't extensive enough to pull it off properly and (2) I fear the backlash when I'd inevitably be identified as an American.
I could write all day about this odd feeling that I have--like being a country girl in the big city for the first time, just linguistically. I don't think it's anywhere near as obvious to me as it is to the locals, who probably speak to American tourists all the time. And yet there's some sort of inferiority complex encoded in my language that makes me ashamed to speak my own native tongue.
Why? Why do I feel simultaneously that I have to defend the use and existence of my mother tongue, while at the same time I feel vulgar when I speak it? I think that in large part it comes from that fact that language use and its social implications are consciously discussed by Brits and Americans, and not favorably. I've heard several Brits express the idea that the Americans have ruined the English language, that we speak it wrong--that we've stolen their lovely language and sullied it, like a teenager borrowing Dad's Merc only to bring it back pimped out, painted with racing stripes, and with all of the levers and buttons replaced with gag toys from the dollar store. It's like they're simultaneously shocked, amused, disappointed, and disgusted. When the Brits impersonate Americans on TV, it's almost always with a Southern twang and an obligatory joke about shooting someone or marrying one's cousin. I've already had my vocabulary or pronunciation corrected to the "proper" word or vowel by half-joking, half-indignant Brits.
And this hits on something deep and scary and unpleasant. One's mothertongue is something precious, no matter what it is. Having been raised monolingual and then having studied other languages later in life, I can comprehend something said to me in German or Japanese, but English, particularly the northwest dialect of American English, speaks to my heart. There's something beautiful and affective about hearing something in my own language that my adopted languages, no matter how much I love and study them, don't have. This is why Bible translation is so important to the spread of Christianity; why, when minority peoples are conquered, their languages are forbidden to keep them under control. One's mother tongue is a function of the heart and soul.
And yet the Brits would have me believe that the language I've grown up with, my own tongue, is stupid and silly and vulgar and wrong--a corruption of the ideal that was stolen from them. My indignation comes from the fact that such an attitude attacks the safety and sanctity of my mother tongue. Yes, of course, I should laugh this off as cultural differences and move on with my life. But there's something interesting here under the skin.
The British attitude toward "the colonies'" languages (by which I mean primarily American, Australian, and Canadian English) is, of course, ridiculous. What is, after all, "correct" English? It can't be the Queen's English, because no one speaks the Queen's except maybe the Queen. English has been developing and evolving constantly for centuries, and modern English diverges from the ancient tongue just like all the other dialects do--look back at Henry Higgins' dialectal disdain and the wealth of dialects that English is comprised of. It's useless as well to say that England has a claim to the ownership of "true" English because English comes from England. It may be better to say that English was partly synthesized in England out of a mishmash of Latin, Greek, French, Germanic, and native tongues. But the development of English in England was just one stage of the language's life, and its offspring that have migrated to other continents are just as legitimate as languages as the one that has grown up on British soil.
It's better and more accurate, to my mind, to speak and think of English as an idea instead of a reality. There are so many dialectal nuiances, cultural eddies, social connections, phonetic variations, and historical transformations that make up the network of the English language that it is impossible to point to one and proclaim that that one is "true English" and the others are just variations. In the same way, there are so many people on our planet, all of which are human, but it's impossible to pick one out as being "the human", of which the other 5,999,999,999 are "just variations." Some are older and have produced others, some have higher social or economic status, but they are all legitimately humans in their own right, just as all languages, no matter how strange or familiar, beautiful or unlovely, high or low, ancient or modern, are all legitimately languages.
Of course, the Brits and I are welcome to feel about our respective tongues however we like, and to prefer one word, one vowel, one turn of phrase over another. And that's lovely, because a world with one language would not be one I would wish to inhabit, and nothing beats a good heated discussion about the relative merits of the features of different languages. But despite the fact that American English is unlovely to my ears now, and the British tongues much more melodious and interesting, my language is above all mine. And no one's allowed to make fun of it but me.
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