¿Mi casa… Jacobolo Ditzolo. Pablo spaniol?
The quote comes from Jacob Ditzel, a character played by comedian Charter McCloskey from the Danish satirical TV show called Ditzel All Inklusiv. Ditzel has gone to the Spanish island of Mallorca and is explaining to the viewers how you make do on the island with only a few Spanish words and phrases. Most importantly, he reminds 11- 12 year old kids that they should say ’¡no!’ to sangrias and cervezas.
One of the reasons why the show is funny to Danes is that many of us have some knowledge of Spanish, although it might be quite limited. This helps us realize that there is something strange about Ditzel’s Spanish – it’s just not quite there. In Danish, it is sometimes jokingly called “skraldespansk”, meaning something like “horrible Spanish”, but also sounding like “trash can”, referring to the fact that it is almost unintelligible. Similarly, many Danes say that they are only able to speak “tourist German” when they go south of the border, which will, at best, allow you to order a beer or two.
However, many people never get further than this very basic level. Many Danes have had multible years of language classes, usually in German, French, or Spanish, but they haven’t learned to speak the given language well – and the same can be said for people learning languages in school in many other parts of the world, including other European countries. I found Spanish very interesting when I was learning it in high school, but most of my classmates found it very boring and never learned to speak anything other than very basic Spanish. My intention is not to offend anyone with this, as it has nothing to do with abilities or intelligence. Also, most Danes speak English very well. This can’t all be due to our English classes, but more so because we are exposed to so much English language media, which makes it almost difficult to not learn some English along the way. The same cannot be said for the other European languages like German or Spanish.
The infamous Danish accent
I’ve always felt that it is a waste of time to be taught something if it doesn’t quite stick. If you have been attending soccer practice for five years and still do not master the basic rules and techniques, you might feel somewhat ashamed. But most people can easily admit that they’ve been studying a language at school for many years without learning much more than to say “hello”, without it bothering them much. Isn’t that a shame? Wouldn’t it be better to achieve more in the classroom, and end up being able to speak a foreign language, opening the doors to other cultures? Many of us might have heard the somewhat overused quote, sometimes dubiously attributed to Nelson Mandela, that sounds something like “the way to a man’s heart goes through his language”. All things considered, I think this is true. Being able to speak a foreign language broadens your horizons and allows you to experience other cultures and ways of life in a different way than if you had to access them only through English.
So when I had the opportunity to write my bachelor’s thesis in linguistics at Aarhus University, I knew what I wanted to examine: Young Danish speakers learning Spanish. I chose Spanish because I have studied it myself in high school, and because it is one of the three languages commonly chosen as a second language in Danish schools, along with German and French. Now, a scientific endeavor should have a clearly defined focus, and mine ended up being pronunciation. I had thought for a long time that many Danes speak foreign languages with a very Danish accent. This is in fact obvious, since Spanish people have a Spanish accent, German people have a German accent, French people have a French accent, and so on. But what exactly leads to this accent? How can you determine that someone has an accent, and if they do, how can you work on reducing this accent in contexts like language classes? This ended up being the focal area of my project.
You’re not creaking enough
Here I started my adventure, and I got contact to three high schools in the Aarhus area. Of course, I received permission first, I didn’t just bust through the door and hope that I interrupted a Spanish class in progress. I specifically chose seniors (Danish third-year students) to be certain that they had received several years of language instruction. I ended up with 25 high school students in my experiment, each pronouncing 22 Spanish sentences while I recorded it. The sentences were written by me specifically to capture their pronunciation of sounds called plosives. Plosives are consonantal language sounds that involve a complete closure of the airstream from the lungs, and then the release of this airstream again, leading to a sort of “mini-explosion” (hence the name “plosive”). It sounds quite technical, but common sounds like “b” and “p”, “t” and “d”, as well as “k” and “g” are plosives. They all share the feature that you cannot continually produce these for a long time. If you pronounce consonants like “n” or an “l”, or vowels like “a” or “u”, you can extend them, i.e. you can keep pronouncing them for as long as you like – try saying “nnnnnn” out loud. But you can’t extend a “p” or a “k” – again, try it by yourself. If you somehow manage to extend these, I’d like to hear from you, since there might be something very special about your speech organs.
Why are these sounds interesting? Well, there is a difference in how they are pronounced in Danish and Spanish. When native Spanish speakers pronounce a “b”, a “d”, or a “g”, these sounds are voiced. It means that their vocal folds are vibrating. Actually, they start to do so even before they have said the sound, which gives a sort of creaky sound in the throat. It might be hard to hear if you aren’t used to it, but once you open your eyes (or ears?) to it, it’s a lot easier to recognize. And the funny thing is, that native Spanish speakers usually don’t know that they do this (unless they’ve studied linguistics at university, I suppose…).
What do Danes subconsciously do when they pronounce a “b”? Well, there is no creaking in the throat. And when they pronounce ”p”, ”t”, or ”k”, the sounds are aspirated, which means that there is a lot of air coming out the mouth, which isn’t the case in Spanish. It’s not something that people do on purpose, just the way our brains have concluded that we should speak a given language. And what do the Danes in my experiment do when they speak Spanish? Well, they pronounce the Spanish plosives as though they were Danish. 7 out of 25 students produced one or more voiced plosives, but none of them did it systematically. In fact, it was only 12 out of the 243 plosives that were produced in total by the students that were voiced, like they are in Spanish. The rest were voiceless, like they are in Danish. You can see an example of this in the image below:
I know it looks like something from Grey’s Anatomy, but allow me to explain: On the left is the sound wave produced by a Danish high school student from my study pronouncing a “b” in the beginning of a Spanish word. For instance, it could be the “b” at the start of bailar (meaning “to dance”). On the right is the sound wave from a native Spanish speaker pronouncing the same sound. The sound wave from the Spanish speaker is different from the Danish high school student. In the blue box on the right, the small, regular waves show that the Spanish speaker has some vibration in their vocal folds before the “b” is pronounced, which happens right when the blue box ends. The student on the left, however, pronounces the “b” exactly as in Danish, with no vocal fold vibration, and without the regular waves. The blue box on the left shows the sound wave of the entire “b”, since there is no creaking of the vocal folds before it is pronounced. But why?
The phenomenon of transfer
The answer lies in a phenomenon called transfer, which is a quite simple phenomenon. Within language, it is what happens when we unconsciously transfer some features from a language we are able to speak to another language that we are attempting to speak. Mostly, it is from our native language(s) to a language we are learning, since our one or more native languages are the languages that we are most proficient in. For transfer to happen, there normally must be similarities between the two languages in which transfer happens. Let me present a sports metaphor to explain this (although I have to admit that I prefer language over sports).
Let’s say you’re good at handball and now you would like to learn how to play basketball. There are a lot of things from handball that you can apply to basketball, such as your ability to catch and throw the ball. However, you might also misunderstand the rules of basketball due to your understanding of handball. In basketball, you’re only allowed to take two steps after dribbling the ball, while you’re allowed to take three steps in handball. If you directly apply your understanding of the rules of handball to basketball, you end up misunderstanding some of the rules. You wouldn’t have made this mistake if you hadn’t known anything about handball, and you definitely wouldn’t have made it if you weren’t even playing a game with a ball, since the misunderstanding about dribbling doesn’t make any sense then.
You can say the same thing about language. If you find two languages to be very similar, you can also sometimes incorrectly assume that the languages are pronounced the same, but you might not make that assumption if we were talking about two very different languages. An important part of reducing transfer is to become aware of the differences between languages that you might not have been aware of before. Most people know that you have to roll your r’s when you speak Spanish, but far fewer people have thought about the fact that you get a little creakier with your vocal folds than when speaking, say, English or Danish.
This leads to my second point: There is not enough focus on pronunciation in language classes, at least in the Danish high school, which means that students never become aware of these differences. When I asked both the teachers and the students after my recording session, they often told me that you’d learn about pronunciation in the first year, and then you wouldn’t talk much more about it, since it was assumed that “everybody knows how to pronounce Spanish”, or something to that degree. However, as I have stated here, this is an incorrect assumption.
Of course, I must admit that pronunciation isn’t always the most important aspect of learning a foreign language with the purpose of communicating efficiently with others. You will often be understood even with a slightly atypical pronunciation, while it is difficult to say anything if you do not have a vocabulary, for instance. You are usually in a better position if you can point at something and say a single word or phrase, rather than if the only word in French you could say was a perfectly pronounced “escargot”, since you wouldn’t be able to, say, introduce yourself or order at a restaurant (other than ordering snails, of course). However, it is still important to improve your pronunciation, since it will always be easier for natives to understand you if your pronunciation is reasonably like theirs, and there are plenty of situations where a “bad” pronunciation in a given language can make you very hard to understand, in spite of your potentially large vocabulary and mastery of its grammar.
Losing one’s accent
So how can you improve your pronunciation? The focus of my study was to examine differences in pronunciation caused by transfer, and not as much to suggest how to reduce it, but I still suggested a few things in my project. One of them is “high variability phonetic training”-exercises, shortened to HVPT. They involve hearing recordings of certain sounds or words pronounced by many different people, allowing you to train your perception, and discover the differences between your native language and the language you are currently learning – such as the creaking of the vocal folds in Spanish. But, of course, this requires more concrete suggestions, which will hopefully increase with future studies.
My most important suggestion is that Danish high schools should continue to teach students about pronunciation even after the first year, and not just assume that the students at that point know how to pronounce the language they are learning. The students should constantly be reminded of the pronunciation differences between Danish, English, and the target language, since it helps open their eyes to the differences they need to be aware of, and reduce the amount of transfer they experience. The more you know about the rules differences of handball and basketball, the fewer rules infractions you will commit. Likewise: The more you open your eyes and ears to differences between Danish and Spanish pronunciation, the more creaky your vocal folds will become when you pronounce a plosive in Spanish.
Andreas Østergaard has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and is now getting a master’s degree in the same subject at Aarhus University. He is especially interested in cross-cultural communication as well as language learning and teaching, particularly due to his own experiences with learning Japanese and Korean for years. He believes it is important to expand your horizons and learn about other cultures, societies, and ways of looking at the world, and he finds language to be especially useful for this purpose.
Foto: Colourbox.dk
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