Introduction
As a newbie to the South, I had never realized that I had an accent of my own. So when I first came to North Carolina , I was astonished at the number of people who commented on my Midwest accent. After quietly listening to me talk for awhile, they'd randomly slip in the question “Where are you from?” into conversations and get the answer that they had expected all along.
Looking back on those experiences, I wondered why I never picked up a very specific accent in one of my friends here at school. Sure, when we first started talking, I noticed a twinge of a southern drawl in her voice, due to the fact that she hails from Birmingham , Alabama , but nothing too apparent. Her English was no different than mine or anyone else's, so the moment I found out she had grown up in Russia and still spoke fluent Russian confused me. How was it that everyone around me could single out my alleged accent, yet I couldn't even pick up a hint or even a trace of a Russian accent from somebody who had grown up in a completely foreign country?
I had many different queries that popped up in my mind after our conversations, so as I got to know Yelena more and more, I tried to get answers to my questions, but the deeper I dug, the more confused I was. That is, until Pinker and The Language Instinct popped into the classroom and began to reveal the mystery of Yelena's missing accent.
Transcription
Yelena introduces herself & translates into English
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Interview with Yelena Yelena: No, I didn't. Um, my friends later told me that I learned it in like three months, but I didn't know anything before I came here. A: Were your parents bilingual before they emigrated from Russia? Y: No, uh, my dad actually studied a little bit of it in I think like college or high school, but not enough to really know anything, but my mom didn't know any of it, any of it at all when she came here. A: So their accents were completely in Russian and there was pretty much no way you would have known any English dialect at all? Y: No, I pretty much had to learn it like when I went to school because I got enrolled in elementary school right when I came here and I just kinda picked it up from my friends around but my parents still have an accent right now, and it's pretty bad (laughs). A: When you first came to America , was it a difficult transition, and did you feel a culture shock? Y: I mean, it was obviously pretty difficult coming from a completely different country, but uh, I kinda blocked it out of my memory. My mom tells me I got into like a state of depression where I would just be really really upset cause I mean you go to a completely new school and you don't know what's going on around you, and you're just like “what's the hell's going on?” But the one good thing that was in my school is that there was like a couple of other Russian people there and so they kind of helped me, um, when I like transitioned myself in. But um yeah, it was definitely a culture shock. A: Um, did the Russian kids that helped you out, had they just immigrated as well, or had they lived in America for a little bit? Y: Well I was 7 and one of the Russian kids that I became like pretty good friends with like immigrated when he was four so he like didn't really, he spoke like a little bit of Russian, like he spoke Russian, but he spoke it with an American accent. So um, which is kind of I think what I have now in Russian. A: Ok. Um, after you were in the United States for awhile, and you had started to learn English, do any of your parents…did any of your parents notice a change in the way you spoke, or about what age did they notice a change in your accent, and a loss in your Russian accent? Y: Well, I mean, when you live with someone every day, and you talk to them like in Russian, as I did with my parents everyday, it's kind of hard to notice a change in, you know, like developing an American accent in Russian. But my mom and I talked about this like a couple of years ago when um, she just kind of said, “you know, I was talking to my friends”, um well actually what happened was that her friends came from Russia to visit us and they were like “Wow, Yelena has like an American accent now.” And they actually said like my mom did too, like when she talked in Russian. Like it wasn't as bad as mine, but…cause you just develop a different dialect cause you're talking to Russian people here but you just talk differently, like you stress different words and stuff. And so, I mean I guess it just comes with time and its probably getting worse and worse, but I mean I can still talk in Russian it's just, I have a little bit of a different dialect.
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Yelena' childhood story Yelena: It wasn't like peer pressure of making fun of me per say, It wasn't like a mean thing, it was just…I mean you're like seven, eight, nine years old, you're going to want to be like everybody else around you, especially when you move from a different country and I remember like this one experience that I'm never going to forget, even though it probably wasn't a big deal at all, but it was like in, I think it was in third grade maybe. No, it must have been in second grade, because it was right when I was still learning English and I'd hurt like my leg one time and we had like recess outside or something and we were playing, or like in gym or something, and my mom and I were trying to figure out like how to say like “I can't do physical activity because my leg is hurt” and the only like thing um that we like figured out how to say was “My foot is sick” you know, cause like, it was kind of sad, but like, um, it was kind of traumatizing. So we were like playing outside with my friends um at the time and like we were running or something and I was telling my friend and I was like, like I probably said it in broken English, I was just like “My foot sick” or something like that. And I just remember them being like “Oh, that's not how you say it!” and they were like “You mean your leg” like they were like “What? Oh, your leg hurts? Or you hurt your leg?” And I was like “Yeah”. But that was kind of like the only time I remember them just being like “What?!” like having difficulty understanding me. But after that, they were like, when we had gym, they were like ok, they explained it to the teacher for me, like why I couldn't, so it turned out being good. |
Analysis
As you found out from the sound bites, Yelena was born in Russia and grew up there for a large portion of her childhood. Russian was her first and only language until she was seven, when she immigrated to the United States knowing no English whatsoever. When she first came, she had a heavy Russian accent, yet as she came to learn English, her speech in Russian began to change as well.
Some may wonder how she was able to learn English at all, since it was not a gradual learning process, but rather a sudden bombardment of new phonemes and morphemes all at once. Despite the fact that this young girl was faced with a completely new syntax, she learned it in approximately three months according to those around her. How is this possible? Because Yelena's second language acquisition occurred before puberty, she was able to quickly learn a new language without too much trouble.
According to Pinker, even highly intelligent people who immigrate to a country and learn a second language never fully develop a believable accent in the new language, or they fail to lose their old one. However, Yelena immigrated during the time period that Pinker dubs the Critical Period, which is a hypothesis that language acquisition ends around the age of 12 years. Since she was seven when she learned her second language, she was able to adapt her ways of speech and eventually talk with the “American accent”, or in her case, a southern accent. With her new dialect acquisition, family friends of Yelena's parents noticed her transition from a Russian accent to a loss of it. While others noticed a change in her speech, she recounts that neither her mother nor her father noticed this transformation since they were with her on a day to day basis.
In his book, Pinker describes an experiment done by researchers who tested the grammatical awareness of immigrants divided into two groups. The groups were those who arrived in America between the ages of three to seven and those who came between the ages of eight and fifteen. In the experiment, the two groups were given a list of English sentences, some with grammatical errors and some without. The younger group performed consistently better than all of those who arrived in America after the age of eight.
This experiment is a great way to show how Yelena's transition into the English language was much easier than her parents. In my interview with her, she said that although her father had studied a little bit of English before coming to America , her family basically was untouched by the language until they moved to Alabama . Yelena succeeded quickly in adapting to the new ways of speech, yet her mother and father had a much more difficult time, since their language acquisition occurred far later in life when it is more complicated to learn and be fluent in a second language. Even to this day, Yelena says her father still has problems speaking it, so she herself usually speaks Russian with him. Both of her parents have also retained their Russian accents, while Yelena lost her own.
After interviewing Yelena and finding out her story and delving deeper into her background, I am now able to give answers to my previous questions about why my perception of an accent in this bilingual student was non-existent to begin with. Pinker and Chomsky can both help explain the “why” of Yelena's changed accent and how it came to alter and be the way it is today.
Sources:
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language . 1st ed. New York : Harper Collins, 1994.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition
About the Author
Hey everybody, my name is Amy Ballard and I grew up all 18 years of my life in Ottawa Hills, Ohio (it's a suburb of Toledo). I've taken Spanish for 5 years and hope to continue that here to keep up on it. This past spring, I took a trip to Spain which was absolutely amazing. We went to Madrid, Segovia, Grenada, Cordoba, Fuengirola, and Toledo. Not only was I immersed in the language, but also fascinated with a different culture. Random little differences between American and Spanish culture intrigued me, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to take this seminar.
I guess the only English dialect I'm really familiar is the midwest one. I'm fine with information technologies. In the area of expressive arts, I used to play piano for awhile and I occasionally still do just for fun. In this course, I would like to learn the connections between customs in different cultures.
I became interested in this topic when I first met Yelena. Wouldn't it have been crazy if she had a Russian and Southern accent combined? I wonder how the combination of accents even works. Maybe someone else can do that for their project…