The myth of the native speaker (with David Crystal)

recently I had the pleasure of talking to a legend in the world of the English language David crystal he is a linguist lecturer a broadcaster and he has written or edited over 100 books about language including the cambridge encyclopedia of the english language we talked about language change the myth of the native speaker and why learning a language is part of being human this is an edited version of our interview if you would like to listen to the full version you will find a link down in the description box I hope you enjoy it as

a teacher of English is a foreign language a lot of learners encounter teachers who talk about standard English and and I wondered how you feel about this idea of a kind of standard English well start the notion of standard English historically of course is a written English and an attractively a printed English it's it's the kind of English at everybody used when the language was written down and even at the beginning when it's standardized it took 400 years for English to standardize you know it start the movement started around about 1400 and it was really

more or less sorted out by 1800 dr. Johnson in his dictionary for instance represents a very clear picture of how English vocabulary and so on was was standardizing in his day but ironically just at the point at which English was settling down into a standard form in Britain it was beginning to diversify because American English was starting across the pond with Noah Webster and the new nation and run by 1800 of course American English existed as a different standard as an emerging standard differently from British English and then later other educated standards emerged in the

written language around the world so one can talk sensibly about you know Australian English and so on very very effectively that the differences are very great you know is still only talking about two or three percent of the language being different between British English and American English it's not a big deal but it's enough to express the different identities of these different countries so standard English is alive and well despite the fact that there's a certain amount of variation in it and when people speak Standard English or try to you know they might learn it

in school or you certainly learn it as a foreign language and then once again you get a general consensus that there are certain features of the English sound system that everybody uses otherwise you're going to be unintelligible and then you're gonna get these this you know a few percent of differences like you know I so you might say bath or bath in this country but it'll be bath in America you know that kind of small difference which doesn't usually amount to an intelligibility but it's certainly there so standard English is certainly there despite the fact

that there's a certain amount of variation in it so the next question is why have a standard language and the answer to that is to promote intelligibility of nationally and internationally it helps us understand each other and that's one of the two big forces that are driving language the other big force as we mentioned earlier really is the need for identity I have to say Who I am and where I'm from and that produces local accents and dialects both nationally and internationally so it's the tension now between these two forces intelligibility saying let's all speak

the same on identity saying no let's be different and it's that kind of tension that is causing well teachers are imagined in various parts of the world a bit of confusion you know quickforce do I allow into my classroom well I think I think maybe well the reason I ask I suppose is because of this general kind of obsession in the world of foreign language teaching with everything you do should be modeled on the kind of native speaker now you know like a native speaker accent ladies speaker grammar and that's history for me yeah that

has gone out of the window with the dodo I mean I know there are people around the world who will still maintain it but it's a myth there was never a native speaker in the sense of somebody who hasn't been influenced by some sort of local variation here and there all sorts of mixed accents people especially these days people moving about the country and accommodating to the accent of the place in which they find themselves all this kind of variation is there remember that RP was only ever spoken by about that most in its history

5% of the speakers of England remember not Wales or Scotland or Ireland and these days it's probably round about 2% of the population and even RP of course has changed its character so it's no longer the very very posh far back kind of accent that we heard you know a few decades ago but go around the english-speaking world now and look at the majority of speakers who are out there and try listening for RP and see how often you find it you know you can stand at the corner of Oxford Street and I did this

once for a BBC programme and made notes about the accents I heard as they passed by you know I could wait for ages it's like London buses you know before one turns up before an RP accent turned up and when when one does turn up my wife Hilary and I often turn to each other and say hey RP lives there were so pleased to hear it you know because it's so rare so what preparing our students for you know in terms of listening comprehension they have got to be made aware of the fact that English

is now multiple in its accent or might add you kated English now I'm not talking about you know people who don't have an educated background people you want to identify with as a learner and unmixed accents and and modified RP accents and all sorts of things American tinged accents and accents themselves of course all of these things are now absolutely belong so from a comprehension point of view you've got to introduce students to this kind of variation otherwise they're going to be living in a fool's paradise from a production point of view of course think

necessarily changes if you're used to teaching RP and all your materials are in RP and that's your lobbying your life then by all means teach our Peter students or produce it's a perfectly reasonable accent you know just because it happens to be not so common as it used to be doesn't mean to say it's not got a value it still has and it'll still be heard especially on the radio so there's a difference here I think between production and comprehension just just to just rewind just very slightly because I know that there are some teachers

out there who feel like and I'm not one of them but they feel like well we need to have this this native speaker model because if we don't if we don't have this like you know perfect sort of accent and the grammar like native speakers then what we will do is we will allow chaos chaos will not happen if the teaching has been good I mean one aims for intelligibility always the question then is does a local accent interfere with intelligibility and if it does then the student has not yet learnt the English language and

the teaching has gone horribly wrong somewhere but let's assume now that we've got somebody who is pretty fluent in English but has got a pretty strong accent - Spanish accent Portuguese accent French accent or whatever as long as that person is intelligible to me I have no problem with that whatsoever in fact the intelligibility drive is present so now it's the identity drive that I'm fascinated by I love to hear English spoken with a Spanish accent or accents because of course the variety of Spanish accents is really quite extraordinary especially in South America I love

to hear English spoken with the French accent why but not just because it's delightful but because it helps me identify who the speaker is that they are French fine well that that's what I need to know in order to develop a kind of sense of balance between us in having a conversation in my one type of person who needs to speak RP perfectly like a native speaker so that they cannot be identified as a foreigner and they are spies to be a spy you will probably need to have that kind of disappearing act in your

accent but apart from them I don't any reason whatsoever to aim to become identical to a native speaker they are learner's are not native speakers they are foreigners and I'm the same if I if I'm learning French or Spanish or whatever language I've learnt over the years then so long as I'm intelligible I don't want to say I don't to be a French person or a Spanish person I want to be me and I want my accent to reflect that and to let other people know it and so that kind of climate of increasing acceptance

tolerance and increasingly respect for different actions I think it's becoming increasingly the norm although recognizing that there is still it's still a great deal of conservativism out there no I mean look I totally agree but I also know that there are teachers out there who are saying well you know we can't just have people speaking with a Spanish or French accents because you know we need it's it's that whole kind of for me it's a very almost colonialism kind of attitude about you know homogenizing the the language and the people who speak it yeah people

have people have to realize that that there is no such thing as homogeneity in in language there is always variation and as long as the variation doesn't get in the way of intelligibility then it has to be respected first and then fostered really because these are markers of identity and you know the difference between intelligibility and identity is not just an intellectual difference intelligibility is full ahead identity is full of heart you know who you are which community you belong to which community you're proud to belong to you you you want to foster that at

the same time of course as needing to be understood and understand other people who belong to the same community know that the really disastrous thing in the attitude that you've mentioned is that in many language teaching schools around the world I understand if you're a native speaker of a language you get paid more even if you are not it is speaker of language even though the non-native speaker of the language may know more about the English language than the native speaker does and if you ask me who I want to be taught by do I

want to be taught by a native speaker doesn't know one end of grammar from the other or by a non-native speaker who is very familiar with English grammar and knows how to teach it I know who I'm voting for every time you know my experience again is with with a lot of foreign learners and and you know learning a learning a language any language is really really difficult and it takes a really long time in fact I believe you yourself you've described learning the language as AI climbing a mountain well let me first of all

say that the metaphor of the mountain when I used it to talked about vocabulary being the Everest of language it was vocabulary I was thinking of more than anything else not pronunciation not grammar those aren't mountains really you know and when you think about it if you're learning English that are depending on the accent 4044 sounds that you have to learn well that's not a big deal really it might take you a while to get your tongue around them but you know any anybody can handle that number of sounds within a reasonably short period of

time when you get onto grammar leaving aside some of the most sophisticated forms of grammar you might get in literary expression or very advanced scientific language or what have you we're only talking about what you know I did the index to the big quirk grammar the comprehensive grammar of the English language when you count up all the points about grammar that are in that big book there are about 3,500 of them so that might seem like a lot to a beginner but come on 3,500 points you can handle that over a period of four or

five years or something and most of them you'll get in the first year but oak Abbe you Larry Wow now we are talking about an Everest because how many words are there in the English language well nobody knows but you know two million probably far more than that and you're competent average native speaker adult will have a vocabulary of about you know fifty sixty thousand words something of that order of magnitude well that is a task and I remember very well from my own learning of foreign languages you know I could handle the pronunciation and

the grammar to a reasonable extent quite quickly but the vocabulary that is the killer you know how do you get all that under your belt and that to my mind is the the biggest problem when people get to that intermediate stage they've they've they can do conversations now very well you know they've got a pretty solid command of grammar they've got the pronunciation pretty well they can even probably write it and spell it reasonably well - who knows but the vocabulary you just think oh no I mean I just don't know these words that are

coming up and that can be the slippery slope into depression it seems to me and so now here's the interesting point Christian at least it seems to me so what we need now is good techniques for teaching vocabulary and where are they you know where are the good vocabulary teaching materials piles of grammar teaching materials all over the place pronunciation materials everywhere but vocabulary often still I observe in classrooms or read new textbooks and the chapter-by-chapter organization is you know to do with a grammatical point and at the end it says here's the vocabulary you

need in order to understand this chapter learn that off by heart you know and you have to you sort of learn this set of words that turned up in the chapter there's no structural approach to vocabulary a kind of semantic structural approach is very definitely needed now I do see some signs of this happening at an academic level and in applied linguistics but when you get down to the classroom I mean you tell me I mean is there a good structured vocabulary graded thing that would take you all the way through for that intermediate period

I don't know of one what would you say a to people who you know to people who really really want to learn a language but they're lacking motivation like what is like a really great reason or some great reasons to learn language well a whole cluster of things I suppose the fact that we are living in a multilingual and multicultural world and you know fight fire mountains because they're there these languages are there so if you're curious about the nature of the planet and what it means to be human then you've got to very quickly

start addressing the question of why why are all these differences there it's a matter of temperament partly some people are only interested in similarities but I for one and I think perhaps I'm in the majority are interested in differences I don't spend my whole life just talking to the people I know who have exactly the same background as me I want to find out about the diversity that really will give me an insight on what it means to be human there are something like 6,000 languages in the world I'd look to study all of them

because each one has an individual insight into the nature of the human condition no other language has got and the more I learn another language not the fluency level necessarily mind you know just enough to get a sense of what it's like what it's about how the people think in it and so on then this illuminates me and my language more than anything else so there's all those theoretical sort of reasons and then there are the practical reasons of course so I'm trying to sell you some goods and I know your language or at least

a bit and you've gone about I for me because I know your language whereas if I say I want to sell you some goods but you've got to learn English mate sorry III just can't be bothered to learn your language you're going to buy my goods now all that sort of economic kind of argument is increasingly important in this day and age there is two other reasons you know there are a host of other reasons as well and what people need is the two crucial things motivation which I've been talking about but the other big

factor is opportunity and that is much trickier and by opportunity I mean you know it's got to be there in the educational system it's got to be there in the cultural system people not far more people would be learning foreign languages in this country and I guess it's the same in many others if if foreign language learning was given the the national respect that it needs and my national respect I mean things like prizes you know if you're a physicist you want the Nobel Prize don't you if you're a literature you want the Nobel Prize

why as I know Nobel Prize for languages why are there no internationally recognized crises at that level there's a Templeton Prize for progress in religion why isn't there a Templeton type prize for progress in languages why have languages be left off the agenda here why didn't Nobel ignore languages so much this puzzles me greatly and it seems to me that if we could build into our international society criteria like that date prizes language days there are some of those we do have some international language days mother tongue language day for example but even so lingua

Pax has a little prize for instance there are a few things around but nothing major and that's the sort of perspective within which people would say Oh learning a language is not just useful for me because I might sell some goods I'm not just useful for me because I might learn something about other languages which will illuminate me no it's because language learning is valued by society at an international level it's starting to happen at an endangered language level people are realizing that of those 6,000 languages half of them are so seriously endangered they're going

to die out in the course of the present century and this is beginning to worry people and people starting to do something about it but I'm not just talking about endangered languages here I'm talking about all the languages of the world it's that kind of international value we need to see present and it's still there's still a long way off from that so that would help enormous Lee I think again thank you very much for your time well I appreciate it well it's pleasure all power to you I've been busy filling pages I've been busy

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