Bidialectalism

I learned something interesting from The Jonathan Ross Show the other day, or at least indirectly through one of the guests – Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame. She's American. So I was a bit confused that she sounded more British than me (my West Country twang always lets me down). 

A quick Google search reliably informed me that she’s “bidialectal”, dahling. Yes, this word really does exist! Or at least it does Stateside…I couldn’t find a definition in the Oxford Dictionary online, but Merriam Webster came up trumps:

BIDIALECTALISM: facility in using two dialects of the same language (also: the teaching of Standard English to pupils who normally use a nonstandard dialect).

It seems most bidialectal celebrities, Gillian Anderson included, moved from one English-speaking country to another at a young age, and adopted their new (now perfect) accent in an attempt to fit in.

Perhaps the most bizarre example of a bidialectal actor is John Barrowman, who was born in Glasgow to Scottish parents but grew up in Illinois. Here’s a compilation of clips showing how he can quite naturally flit between the two (it’s interesting but I suggest you only watch the first few minutes – whoever put this film together is clearly a massive John Barrowman fan).

 

Do you shop at Leedle?

A friend recently asked how I pronounce the name of the German store Lidl. My initial response was, “Liddle, of course”. But then I remembered that in Germany they say “Leedle” – so that’s what I use when I’m over there.

This threw up the question of whether we English speakers should pronounce foreign words exactly as they’re spoken in their native language. For me, the answer’s no – not necessarily.

After all, surely the main purpose of pronunciation is to make both speaking and comprehension as easy as possible, whichever language we're talking in?

Just take the automotive brand Volkswagen. On the off chance a non-German speaker manages to pronounce this the German way – so pholks-va-gen (apologies to linguistics buffs for my poor phonetic spelling) – would you understand them immediately? Possibly not.

Fact is, people are generally quite lazy and don’t want to have to go out of their way to pronounce or understand a word. And this isn't just an English thing. In the UK we pronounce IKEA, Sweden’s greatest export, as i-keeya. In Germany it’s ee-keeya. But my friend Kira, a native Swedish speaker, tells me this:

“We would say ee-ke-a, no ‘y’ sound, with the ‘k’ sounding like the french ‘que’ and the ‘a’ like the german ‘a’.”

So neither English nor German speakers pronounce it the 'right' way. But I don’t think it really matters. The main thing is that we make ourselves easily understood (it's about good old audience centricity again). And if altering the way we pronounce a word helps us to do that, all the better.

But let’s please not start changing the way we write things because of the way we pronounce them – “I should of paid more attention in school” just isn’t right or cool.