Language Revitalization is Already Difficult. Pronunciation Makes it Harder.

When a language is endangered, how much should we worry about accurate pronunciation?

Accents are a tricky thing. Everyone has one, and yet, many people spend much of their lives wishing that their accent in a second language sounded more like someone else’s. Most of the time, that someone is the pinnacle of idealized accuracy, fluency, and authenticity: the “native speaker.”

One of those people is my mom. She immigrated to the US from Taiwan when she was in her 20s, and will occasionally lament: “I’ve been here for 30 years, and my English is still so bad!”

To be clear: it’s most definitely not. My mom’s English level is great — certainly highly advanced! But in her eyes, it will never really be perfect for one main reason: her accent.

Admittedly, pronunciation is one of the parts of a language that is the hardest for an adult language learner to acquire. Unless you attend a phonology boot camp or hyper-fixate on adjusting your pronunciation to the point of insanity, you probably won’t be “getting rid” of your accent anytime soon.

You can even have a pretty good awareness of what you “should” sound like, but still fall short in making those sounds yourself. For example, I know that Taiwanese Hokkien has a bunch of nasal sounds, but whenever I try to do it, I feel a little silly. I didn’t grow up making those sounds myself, so it’ll take me some time to learn to produce it accurately (and without feeling self-conscious).

But when you get down to it, pronunciation is just one of the small parts that makes up a language, and is often unfairly targeted for being the main indicator of someone’s language proficiency. (Adult language learners rejoice!)

For example, you could be a champ at distinguishing your b’s and p’s, but have jumbled syntax, constantly swapping your subjects and objects and throwing your verb wherever it seems convenient. Or you have a real knack for reducing words (subbing “should not have” with “shouldnduf” at every turn), but have terrible awareness of how to use language appropriately in varying social settings.

So while pronunciation can be difficult for adults to acquire, that doesn’t mean that gaining high proficiency in a language is impossible if you’ve already made it through puberty (for more, see my article on the Critical Period Hypothesis here).

Are Kids Really Better at Language Learning than Adults?

When Pronunciation Matters

But for some language learners, especially those whose target language is actively at the risk of falling dormant, the difficulties of acquiring accurate pronunciation take on new significance. Because pronunciation is inherently tied with questions of identity, authenticity, and legitimacy — much more intimately so in a language revitalization context.

Here’s an example. The goals of someone learning a dominant global language, like Spanish, could be to gain knowledge of a language and culture, communicate with Spanish speakers, or maybe just for fun and personal growth. But someone learning an endangered language would likely have more urgent and incredibly personal motivations: saving their language from extinction, resisting assimilation, and deepening their own connection to their culture, community, and identity.¹

So when an English-influenced accent starts to creep in for someone who’s learning a language like Navajo, this can be especially alarming and unwanted. When a language is being learned to ensure its survival (and almost all the time, this is inherently connected with cultural survival as well), ensuring that pronunciation stays consistent across the generations can be a high-priority task.

Regardless, the harsh reality remains that pronunciation is one of the hardest things for adult language learners to master. And in fact, hyper-focusing on accurate pronunciation can sometimes have undesirable outcomes for language learners: namely, the deemphasis of language as a tool for communication and meaning-making, and the heightened risk of increased frustration and demotivation.

So what do we do with all this? Should accurate pronunciation be pushed to the side, making space for slightly inaccurate learners (who are speakers nonetheless) while accepting the inevitability of language change? Or should accurate pronunciation be an innate component of language revitalization, especially for the purpose of maintaining the authenticity of the language?

A SENĆOŦEN case study

For SENĆOŦEN speakers and learners in Canada, this tension is a reality.² One of the distinctions that they made in order to tackle this problem was consciously deciding when pronunciation matters, and when it doesn’t. Specifically: What variations of pronunciation in SENĆOŦEN are acceptable? And which ones necessitate correction?

One of the conclusions that was drawn was based on determining where exactly the language change was coming from. For example, variation produced as a result of SENĆOŦEN coming into contact with neighboring Indigenous languages was deemed acceptable. But variations that changed the actual meanings of words were errors in need of correction.

In English, it might look something like this. An American speaker of English pronouncing the word “bath” as [bæθ] versus a British speaker of English pronouncing the same word as [baθ] would be an acceptable variation. Different vowels, but no inherent shift in meaning. Whereas a speaker claiming a “bath” to be a “path” would need to be corrected, because now the meaning has changed. This distinction became helpful in guiding teachers to be selective when it came to learning pronunciation.

Aside from understanding when variation should be addressed, efforts to work towards learning accurate pronunciation were still made. One method that the community decided on was ensuring that young learners (who are more adept at acquiring pronunciation) had solid opportunities to develop phonological awareness in SENĆOŦEN. And adult learners were given an increased awareness of some of the potential challenges in acquiring pronunciation in order to mitigate potential frustration.

Ultimately, the authors of the SENĆOŦEN study concluded that communities undergoing language revitalization must find an ideological and practical balance for themselves. For SENĆOŦEN learners and speakers, this required thinking through two questions: how can the elders’ ways of speaking be honored? And how can language learners be supported with realistic goals surrounding pronunciation?

A Cherokee case study

Another setting in which pronunciation has come up is in the context of schooling; specifically, the Cherokee immersion school.³ In one school, teachers and researchers observed a fun linguistic phenomenon taking place: translanguaging, or, when learners draw from their multiple linguistic resources to make meaning.

The translanguaging practices of students meant that languages were mixed and melded together in a few interesting ways. For example, the immersion students’ pronunciation of words, vowels, and tones were faithful to Cherokee, but they were influenced on the sentential level by English.

One instance of this can be found in question-asking. When we ask a question in English, we mark it using rising intonation (read the sentence “did you go to the store today?” and note your own rising intonation in your head). Cherokee does not require rising intonation, but students were doing it anyway.

Students were also marking possession on Cherokee words by adding an —’s, and inserting the Cherokee nominalization suffix —i to English words, like “cheese-i,” when they weren’t sure of its Cherokee counterpart.

So, how did the teachers feel about all this mixing and matching? Interestingly, they made a conscious decision to challenge the idealized notions of what makes a speaker a “speaker,” as well as the standards of proficiency when it comes to language learning. Instead of deeming children’s novel ways of meaning-making through translanguaging to be unacceptable or inauthentic to Cherokee, teachers were encouraged by the new life that Cherokee seemed to be taking on through the students’ speech.

And in fact, the authors found translanguaging to be a promising link between conflicting ideologies of “fluency” — specifically, the notion of fluency being an idealized standard to work towards, and the desire for language to spread into new domains like schools and the Internet. In the end, their students’ translanguaging practices were evidence of them actively taking part in language renewal — shaping and repurposing the language for their own contexts, even if the language was starting to look a little different.

A community decision

The ideologies of pronunciation — especially when it comes to learning an endangered language — require careful consideration for anyone supporting language revitalization. It’s not always clear-cut when it comes to determining what’s accurate, what’s authentic, and what’s appropriate in order for the language to take on new life in the future. In the end, the way pronunciation is learned and taught should always be informed by the values and goals of the community. It is their own language, after all.

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1. Hinton, L. (2011). Language revitalization and language pedagogy: New teaching and learning strategies. Language and Education, 25, 307-318. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2011.577220.

2. Bird, S., & Kell, S. (2017). The role of pronunciation in SENĆOŦEN language revitalization. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 73(4), 538–69.                      https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.4060

3. Peter, L., Hirata-Edds, T., Feeling, D., Kirk, W., Mackey, R. Q. W. Q., & Duncan, P. T. (2017). The Cherokee Nation immersion school as a translanguaging space. Journal of American Indian Education, 56(1), 5-31. https://doi.org/10.5749/jamerindieduc.56.1.0005