Questões Militares de Inglês - Aspectos linguísticos | Linguistic aspects

Multilingualism needs to be understood not so much in terms of separate monolingualisms (adding English to one or more other languages) but rather in much more fluid terms. We can start to think of ELT classrooms in terms of principled polycentrism (Pennycook, 2014). This is not the polycentrism of a World Englishes focus, with its established or fixed norms of regional varieties of English, but a more fluid concept, based on the idea that students are developing complex repertoires of multilingual and multimodal resources. This enables us to think in terms of ELT as developing resourceful speakers who are able to use available language resources and to shift between styles, discourses, registers and genres. This brings the recent sociolinguistic emphasis on repertoires and resources into conversation with a focus on the need to learn how to negotiate and accommodate, rather than to be proficient in one variety of English. So an emerging goal of ELT may be less towards proficient native-speaker-like speakers (which has always been a confused and misguided goal), and to think instead in terms of resourceful speakers (Pennycook, 2012) who can draw on multiple linguistic and semiotic resources.

(Pennycook, A. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. London and New York: Routledge. 2017. Adaptado)

The regional accentism that secretly affects life prospects

        At age 22, Gav Murphy was living outside his home country Wales for the first time, working in his first job in media production in London. His South Wales Valleys accent was very thick, he recalls. He’d say ‘tha’ rather than ‘that’, for instance. He was perfectly understandable; yet a senior colleague overseeing his work insisted Murphy change his accent so all the broadcasters sounded uniform on air. The effects of adaptation were far-reaching. “It sort of broke my brain a little bit,” says Murphy. “I thought about literally every single thing I was saying, literally every time I was saying it. Moving to standard English was just laborious.”

        Foreign-accent discrimination is rampant in professional settings. But discrimination can also extend to certain native speakers of a language, because of the judgements attached to particular accents. While many employers are becoming very sensitive to other types of bias, accent bias remains challenging to root out. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

       While the cognitive shortcuts that contribute to accent bias may be universal, the degree of accent awareness and prejudice varies greatly. For instance, “The UK has a very, very fine-tuned system of accent prestige,” says Devyani Sharma, a sociolinguist at Queen Mary University of London. “It’s a combination of a very monolingual past, where English developed as a symbol of the nation, and the very acute social class hierarchy historically.” She adds that overt accent bias in the US is based more on race, whereas in the UK, it’s more tied to class.

        In some cases, accent bias is directly related to government policy. Since the 1860s, the Japanese government has modernised the country with a focus on Tokyo, says Shigeko Kumagai, a linguist at Shizuoka University, Japan. “Thus, standard Japanese was established based on the speech of educated Tokyoites.” In contrast, the Tohoku dialect spoken in northern Japan became “the most stigmatised dialect in Japan”, says Kumagai. Its image is “rural, rustic, old, stubborn, narrow-minded, backward, poor, uneducated, etc”. Young women from Tohoku are often given discriminatory treatment that makes them feel ashamed of their accents.

        A pesquisa de Kumagai mostra que a forte estereotipagem do dialeto Tohoku é perpetuada pela concentração da indústria de mídia na capital japonesa. De fato, em todo o mundo, a mídia tem um impacto enorme na percepção dos sotaques. Portanto, entendemos por que a preponderância de emissoras do Reino Unido em Londres provavelmente contribuiu para a marginalização do sotaque galês de MurphyKumagai’s research shows that the strong stereotyping of the Tohoku dialect is perpetuated by the concentration of the media industry in the Japanese capital. Indeed, the world over, the media has an enormous impact on perceptions of accents. So we understand why the preponderance of UK broadcasters in London likely contributed to the marginalisation of Murphy’s Welsh accent.

(Christine Ro. www.bbc.com, 08.05.2022. Adaptado)