Who the Heck Needs to Learn the British Accent?
Hanging out with the masses of different foreign students here in the LSE and in London, there is often a very clear trend when communicating in English. While people of every other nationality makes a concerted effort (or at least, do not mind) to pick up the standard British accent, the Americans not only makes a concerted effort to reject British English in every single way, they actually, at times, accentuate/highlight the peculiarities of American English so as to make their audience be perfectly clear that they are hearing from an American.
As the Americans get together in the local pub, and start lashing out about how "weird" is the English they hear from English people in a place called England, one has to think about just exactly what makes the Americans so confident and bold (to put it positively) or so arrogant and reckless (to put it negatively) to actually criticize a language at its very historical origin. It is as if the Americans are somehow perfectly convinced that the version of English that they imported from Britain centuries ago evolved to become better than the original language.
To understand the underlying reasoning, it is interesting to compare the situation of Americans in Britain to a very personal experience of being a mainland Chinese in Taiwan. In both cases are people moving to another country (lets set aside the political issue here for now), with somewhat different cultures, that then lend themselves to create unique biases and stereotypes. But the relative positions of the two are quite different. Taiwan, despite contention from Hong Kong, is now considered the pop culture center of the Chinese-speaking world, and would be the undisputed one in Mandarin-speaking areas as long as mainland media controls remain in place.
In other words, Taiwan's status in the Chinese-speaking world is not that different from that of the US in the English-speaking one: the center of all cultural things new and cool and worthy of emulation. Taiwanese pop music and dramas are ubiquitous in Chinese communities around the world, just like American ones are, well, present across the world. And as the culture spread, the unique forms of Taiwanese Mandarin, just like American English, began to be heard not just outside the country of origin.
Cultural attraction is often not felt, and they are often simply unstoppable. That was certainly the case when I traveled to Taiwan in the past summer. In that two-week roaming around the island, I picked up more Taiwanese Mandarin than I did British English for the past almost three months. Come of think of it, there really was not any sort of deliberate effort to learn the Taiwanese accent, just as there is no deliberate effort to not learn the British accent, the process simply happens, in spite of or despite the consciousness or the lack of consciousness to go about a certain way.
In essence, learning an accent is also purely an exercise of desired cultural immersion, unlike learning a new language, where practical purposes of doing business or conducting diplomatic affairs. And people only desire to immerse themselves in cultures that they feel are "cool," "hip," or whatever expression they would use to express superiority. And once they find that "upward cultural gradient," people cannot help but automatically pick up those accents they hear in music, in TV, and in movies.
So, you have people who openly speak about American English sounding like "pure ignorance." Let them continue their random criticisms. Even the most anti-American accent person found in Britain know that the Americans do not care that their accent is being secretly or openly bashed. The Americans, no matter what is said, still take massive, unwavering pride in their "ignorant" accent. With the massive soft power of America backing their pride, the Americans literally have no reasons to feel inadequate about their way of talking, and every concrete evidence to help rationalize why they refuse to adjust for the British accent.
As the world become globalized and movement of information and personnel become more easy and frequent, it is only a matter of time before every language become unified under one single universal accent. That "standard" accent would not be determined by some uncertain notion of historical origin, but by the simple ability for others to feel a certain affinity toward it. And there is nothing better for creating the affinity than cultural power. Well, too bad for British English and mainland Mandarin...
As the Americans get together in the local pub, and start lashing out about how "weird" is the English they hear from English people in a place called England, one has to think about just exactly what makes the Americans so confident and bold (to put it positively) or so arrogant and reckless (to put it negatively) to actually criticize a language at its very historical origin. It is as if the Americans are somehow perfectly convinced that the version of English that they imported from Britain centuries ago evolved to become better than the original language.
To understand the underlying reasoning, it is interesting to compare the situation of Americans in Britain to a very personal experience of being a mainland Chinese in Taiwan. In both cases are people moving to another country (lets set aside the political issue here for now), with somewhat different cultures, that then lend themselves to create unique biases and stereotypes. But the relative positions of the two are quite different. Taiwan, despite contention from Hong Kong, is now considered the pop culture center of the Chinese-speaking world, and would be the undisputed one in Mandarin-speaking areas as long as mainland media controls remain in place.
In other words, Taiwan's status in the Chinese-speaking world is not that different from that of the US in the English-speaking one: the center of all cultural things new and cool and worthy of emulation. Taiwanese pop music and dramas are ubiquitous in Chinese communities around the world, just like American ones are, well, present across the world. And as the culture spread, the unique forms of Taiwanese Mandarin, just like American English, began to be heard not just outside the country of origin.
Cultural attraction is often not felt, and they are often simply unstoppable. That was certainly the case when I traveled to Taiwan in the past summer. In that two-week roaming around the island, I picked up more Taiwanese Mandarin than I did British English for the past almost three months. Come of think of it, there really was not any sort of deliberate effort to learn the Taiwanese accent, just as there is no deliberate effort to not learn the British accent, the process simply happens, in spite of or despite the consciousness or the lack of consciousness to go about a certain way.
In essence, learning an accent is also purely an exercise of desired cultural immersion, unlike learning a new language, where practical purposes of doing business or conducting diplomatic affairs. And people only desire to immerse themselves in cultures that they feel are "cool," "hip," or whatever expression they would use to express superiority. And once they find that "upward cultural gradient," people cannot help but automatically pick up those accents they hear in music, in TV, and in movies.
So, you have people who openly speak about American English sounding like "pure ignorance." Let them continue their random criticisms. Even the most anti-American accent person found in Britain know that the Americans do not care that their accent is being secretly or openly bashed. The Americans, no matter what is said, still take massive, unwavering pride in their "ignorant" accent. With the massive soft power of America backing their pride, the Americans literally have no reasons to feel inadequate about their way of talking, and every concrete evidence to help rationalize why they refuse to adjust for the British accent.
As the world become globalized and movement of information and personnel become more easy and frequent, it is only a matter of time before every language become unified under one single universal accent. That "standard" accent would not be determined by some uncertain notion of historical origin, but by the simple ability for others to feel a certain affinity toward it. And there is nothing better for creating the affinity than cultural power. Well, too bad for British English and mainland Mandarin...
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