10 Aug Time to Grow Up
Last week social media networks were flooded with comments about the speech that Mrs. Michelle Muscat’s gave on Women’s Day. Whilst I will not comment about the content of the speech because I didn’t listen to it, the Facebook comments about her accent and pronunciation reminded me of schoolyard bullying.
When I was nine years old I was moved from one of the best co-ed Maltese speaking schools on the island, to an all-girls English-speaking school. The language change wasn’t a problem because even at that age I could already speak English very well but, because I’m Maltese and (shock horror) we spoke Maltese at home, my pronunciation wasn’t perfect. It still isn’t and never will be for that matter.
For months on end that new schoolyard was full of girls bitching about my accent. It was hell on earth. I was taunted, bullied and picked on for saying ‘Frence’, instead of ‘France’ and ‘tree’ instead of ‘three’. I was shunned for saying ‘modderr’ instead of ‘mother,’ and ‘wuman’ instead of ‘wemmen.’ It didn’t matter that I was top of my class and that I could outrun most of the lazy buggers in a sprint, for a few months all that mattered was that I didn’t speak the way the others did.
At that age it was still important for me to I fit in, so I did my best to change the way I spoke. I tried my very best to learn the ‘right way’ of saying certain words, especially those that somehow seemed to give away my geographical and economic background. When the taunting stopped I thought that it was because I had finally learnt to speak English the way it should be spoken, but I soon found out that it had more to do with the fist-fight I won during an epic PE lesson, rather than having learnt to pronounce the word ‘berday’ correctly.
The truth is that the way those silly girls spoke wasn’t the right way of speaking either. Their accent, intonation and pronunciation were just another concoction of Maltese and English (Minglish, I call it) – a concoction that was different to mine, but still nowhere near proper.
Unfortunately, because childhood experiences seem to follow us throughout our lives, today, 30 years later, I still cringe when I hear a Maltese person speaking English with a really thick Maltese pronunciation, especially if it’s a public speech. But let’s face it, it’s my cringing that I should be ashamed of and not the speakers because, it’s ridiculous to cringe at what is essentially a natural way of speaking English when you’re Maltese. It’s only our inbuilt inferiority complex that has us snubbing our own people in the belief that if they don’t ‘pass’ as native speakers they will not be taken seriously.
I’m not talking about bad grammar or bad spelling here because there’s no excuse for turning nouns into verbs or using the wrong tense for the wrong purpose. And I’m not talking about bad content and bad arguments either, but ‘bad’ pronunciation is a phenomenon that affects every non-native speaker of any language – it’s what makes everyone and anyone (except for trained actors) carry the intonation and phonological processes from their mother tongue into their second language.
The saddest thing is that when Mrs. Muscat gives a speech in English, we cringe, but when we listen to a French man garble the words “…you say dat you ave neveer eard of ze grate Brudget Bardoe?” we melt, and call him cute. And have you ever listened to Jean-Claude Junker, Angela Merkel, and Jose’ Barosso give a speech in English? As thick as their accent and pronunciation is, I bet you didn’t cringe did you?
Whilst the medium might very well be the message, it’s time that we grow up and stop this schoolyard mentality especially amongst us females where it seems to fester the most. To judge people by anything else except what they say and do is petty, futile and wrong. It’s time that we got it into our thick heads that whoever has been born and bred here in Malta, or anywhere else for that matter, will always have some kind of an accent that’s different to a native speaker. In fact, except for maybe the Queen and possibly her immediate family, no one, not even the British, speak what we consider ‘proper’ English.
So what if some of us pronounce their ‘d’s as ‘t’s, or roll their ‘rs’ a bit too much? What we should really be ashamed of are Maltese people who can’t speak Maltese to save their lives, and those who put on a fake English accent even when cussing in Maltese, especially if they do so to make vulgar swear words sound a little bit poshier.
First published on the Malta Independent on Sunday in March 2014
