Not "feeling" like losing an accent (dialect?)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 30, 2006, at 3:39 PM, Tom Zurinskas wrote to Beverly Flanigan:

> ... My conjecture is that native USA English speakers that drop
> the sound "awe" and replace it with "ah" are exposed enough to the
> sound
> "awe" through TV and radio that they can say it if they want to but
> they
> don't want to.  As Krashen says in his conjecture, it doesn't feel
> right to
> them.  This is opposed to your conjecture that they actually
> physically
> "cannot say it"....

krashen's conjectures are largely a red herring here.  and nobody's
conjecturing that people *physically* cannot produce certain sounds.
what's going on is something subtler: a *mental* barrier to producing
distinctions *in connected speech*.

as far as i know, people who have leveled /a/ and /O/ in favor of /a/
can certainly learn to produce [O] -- indeed, a great many of them
have done so, in exclamations like "awww" or in imitations of the
pronunciations of single words in other dialects (like the new
yorker's "cawfee").  what is so difficult is integrating the
distinction into connected speech.

the problem is that each of us has acquired an amazingly complex,
highly automatized, and intricately coordinated set of routines for
producing our dialect of our native language.  almost all of this is
not under conscious control, and it could not possibly be: even a
short utterance requires hundreds of gestures, in sequence or
overlapping with one another, performed on a time scale of
milliseconds to centiseconds.  (similar things are true of speech
perception.)

that's the psychological side of things.  you can see similar effects
in child language acquisition. parents will tell you their kid "can't
pronounce"  r -- but the kid can imitate a dog's snarl  just fine, or
might be able to produce r in a single over-learned "favorite" word.
a kid who regularly devoices word-final d to t is often entirely
capable of producing a word-final d -- but only when aiming for the
even more difficult word-final n.  the problem isn't physical
ability, but psychological control of a complex set of coordinated
abilities.

this is not arcane knowledge, but the stuff of introductory
linguistics courses.

but there's also a social side to things.  in principle, we could, if
sufficiently moved, learn to shift to another dialect, including
learning phonemic distinctions we didn't used to have.  but there has
to be a strong motivation to do so -- a social motivation, usually
also under the level of consciousness.

we're all confronted by vast amounts of variation in language every
day.  in the face of that, almost everybody is conservative most of
the time, sticking pretty much to the system they've learned; there's
just too much to choose from.  certainly, nobody can know which
variants someone like you thinks they "ought" to be using, and if you
try to tell them how to talk they are naturally going to be resistant
(just as you are when people try to tell you how to talk).  yes,
people are resistant to change their habits, especially when these
are shared with the people closest to them.

arnold

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