Are you looking to learn French and wondering if it’s okay to learn from a Québecois if you’re going to travel to France?
Are you looking to learn Spanish and afraid to talk to your Puerto Rican coworker to practice for your Costa Rican vacation?
Are you afraid your mother-in-law’s thick Long Island accent is going to affect your children’s language development if she’s around them too much?
Take a deep breath and reconsider what linguists remind us of all the time… No one speaks a language! Not one of us speaks a pure, unadulterated language without any admixture or influence because there is no such thing as a pure language anyway. Like a Platonic Form, languages exist only in abstraction. Each one of us speaks some personal version of a language that’s conditioned by our age, schooling, gender, race, background, interests and experiences. The language we each use is as unique as we are. It goes deeper, though. We’re even capable of adapting our language to circumstance, audience or whim. We can use language as much to fit in socially as we can to communicate.
This all means that the language you’re trying to learn is more diverse than most of us take into account when we pick up a beginning or even an intermediate language textbook. So, what knits a language together then into a cohesive group? Speakers of the same language adhere to some basic principles of structure and content (my code words for the dreaded pair also known as grammar and vocabulary). When speakers adhere to those basic principles, they allow what they’re saying to be understood by others who speak that language, which is the true test linguists use to determine speakers of a single language.
So, if you’re determined to learn Portuguese but you won’t accept help from a tutor from Lisbon because you’re looking to go to Rio, you’re missing out! If you’re anywhere but on the final laps of your language-learning journey, ALL practice is good practice. ALL practice is teaching you something about the system, the codes and the features of the language you’re trying to learn. Only when you reach the most advanced levels can you worry about perfecting an accent tied to a region, and even then you should expose your ears to all the variants of the language to be conversant with as many of its speakers as you can.
If you’re still unconvinced, I’d like to introduce you to a test devised a while back to understand how young language learners make sense of new words. In 1958 the psychologist Jean Berko-Gleason devised what has become known as the wug test. While working with young children, she showed a picture of an odd shape recognizable as a living thing with an eye and feet, and told the children it was a wug. Then she showed two of them and the children could tell him without hesitation that there were two wugs. That’s because they were applying a series of rules about language in general and English in particular. If I told you now that what you’re doing is wugging this blog post, you could easily tell me that you’ve loved it so much that you sent it to a friend so she could wug it too! This proves there’s nothing to fear about local vocabulary and regionalisms. They make up a small part of all speech anyway, and you can easily pick up local expressions as you travel or work.
Maybe I’ve managed to convince you about vocabulary, but you’re still worried about differences in pronunciation. It’s true, some languages can swing widely in terms of how things are pronounced, and we all know the difficulty we’ve experienced listening to people speak our native language with an accent, but this is where the good news comes back again. Pronunciation may vary in notable ways from one area to another, but it also varies in more subtle ways from one speaker to another. Any of us who are old enough to remember only listening to our teachers and a few cassette tapes or records before landing in another country for our first study abroad experience and being shocked so badly we thought we’d taken the wrong plane know that all too well. But luckily, in our media-saturated age, we can benefit from all of the recordings of different speakers to help us all understand a variety of accents, and our instructors – no matter what their background – know resources for you to access to help you along the way.
So, forget about looking for just the right dialect, and forget about thinking that geography is the only determiner of language variation. Instead, trust Your Language Connection to be connected with a true professional who can teach you the fundamentals of language and expose to you the variations that will make you comfortable in any situation.