Play Time

I feel rather embarrassed that the only language I can speak fluently is English. Theoretically I can speak or understand Afrikaans after having been taught it for 8 years from around age 9. I speak Durban Boy Afrikaans though. This means we were taught almost the same lessons every year with very little progress until a big push right at the end for final exams. Durban was part of Natal, which became KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), and had the nickname of 'The last outpost' as one of the places that spoke very little Afrikaans. The map below of KZN shows the dominant language spoken. Blue is not Afrikaans. It is not English. It is Zulu... hence the new name of the province. So why Afrikaans was my second language rather than Zulu is a sad legacy of Apartheid.

Source: www.bidorbuy.co.za and Wikipedia

Since it was such a 'useful' language growing up in the area, Durban Boy Afrikaans carried tell tale signs that would be picked up elsewhere around the country where Afrikaans was actually useful. The wikimap below shows the proportion of people who speak Afrikaans at home in South Africa. the darkest green showing 80-100% of households, and the lightest 0-20%. I don't regret learning Afrikaans. I have lots of Afrikaans friends and colleagues, but the truth is they speak to me in English.  That DBA accent must be painful to their ears.

So, in truth, I really only speak English. Recently Richard Dawkins asked on twitter what we would do if we redesigned the world today. One suggestion he made was that there would be only one language. The great advantage of this would be that we could all understand each other. I don't think one language is the best answer though. A common language, definitely. As a tool for peace, simply being able to understand someone must be the strongest barrier to bloodshed. What is lost though is that different languages have different characters. Like different styles of art or music. We may all understand each other if all art was photography and all music was written and performed by Justin Bieber, but I am suspicious that we would be worse off.

The challenge speaking the defacto common language of the world is that most other language speakers can speak English (Yes, yes, I am ignoring the small matter of Asia). As soon as you struggle in a dodgy accent, they switch to English. In fact, even if you aren't struggling, they may enjoy the opportunity to speak even if their English is broken as a way to improve it. That is an opportunity that few English speakers get unless they actively seek it out or if they go to wine drinking, frog eating countries that don't like them very much. Gabe Wyner, writer of Fluent Forever argues that that is the trick. Speaking without an accent that is, not frog eating. He also only spoke English before deciding to embark on a career as an opera singer. This involved the need to learn to speak other languages properly. His argument is that you need to trick people into believing you are fluent by getting the accent correct. Then even with a few words (apparently 625 words make up c. 80% of most spoken languages), you can start participating in conversations, listening to music, watching TV shows and feeling the inspiration to actually put the effort into learning a language. So the approach he suggests starts with sounds and pronunciation. (See the wonderful site www.forvo.com)

One excuse a lot of English speakers use is that we didn't pick the language up as a child, and so it is much harder now. I know many people who cite research to back this up. My argument though is that we don't have enough adult English learners really giving it a go to know if this is true. How many adults have given it the same go that a child does: participating in plays, singing songs, learning poems, watching movies and TV shows, even going to speech therapy (which seems a lot like drama lessons). Adult actors seem to pull off passable if not perfect accents. We celebrate kids ability to learn but this may be because they are actually trying. They learn quite slowly in fact. They are just given the space to do it and actually try. Adults are just too busy and too serious to play. Put me up against any 5 year old, or 10 year old, who speaks English and lets have a go. Bring it. I'll play.

Source: The L Magazine