By Laurie James Bines
Phonetics is something that we, as teachers, and you, as students, rarely spend much time
talking about. English is a language, but like all languages, it is also a philosophy. The
English philosophy is something unique amongst its neighbours, largely because it resists
prescriptivism; there is little to which the Anglo-Saxon tongue is more allergic than the idea
of things being objectively correct or incorrect. Our linguistic institutions, if you can even
consider us to have them, exist to observe and record the ways we speak and write, not to
dictate them.
You might consider our resistance to prescriptivism as symptomatic of our free spirit, or
arrogance, depending on whom you ask, but a big part of the picture is also the fact that the
English language has no real need for regulation. What I mean by this is that, within many
languages, regulatory bodies invest a large amount of their energy into defending the purity
of their tongues from a swelling wave of anglicisms. Words like ‘defend’ and ‘purity’ might
sound hyperbolic, but look at France, home to ‘Les gardiens de la langue française’ – an
entity by whose name I can only imagine to consist of ten bald men stroking long white
beards around a mahogany table, tilting and bruxing at such transgressions as ‘Le
weekend’, which the vast majority of French freely elect to employ over the more syllabic ‘Fin
de semaine’. English has no use for these kinds of defenders, as our proud ignorance
nullifies all threats of the possibility of us learning a foreign word anyway.
This leaves us with a language largely unregulated, without any kind of top-down force
discouraging us from local – even individual – variations in vocabulary, grammar, and, indeed,
phonetics – sometimes in extreme measure.
The breadth of cultures who speak it differently and yet regard English, at least formally, as a
native language, is another key motive for our rejection of prescriptivism – if we are to call my
accent (English, largely Received Pronunciation – a ridiculous phrase – with hints of my
native Essex) ‘Correct’, what does that say of my Irish cousin, who pronounces a great deal
of vowels and consonants otherwise to me? Is his accent, by projection, ‘Incorrect’? What of
how the Jamaican man speaks, or the Australian woman, the Scottish retiree or the Nigerian
child? The implications of elevating the validity of one, or some of our dialects, over the
thousands of others are offensive, and the implications of giving equal validity to all dialects
are useless, so we simply prefer not to think about it at all. It might surprise you to discover
that this is, in fact, a sustainable way for a language to operate! But it also makes phonetics
a sort-of-impossible subject in an academic context, as the most a teacher can realistically
do is offer their own particular accent for imitation.
One benefit of the hands-off approach to phonetics (barely talking about it at all) is that it
allows the student to explore what I consider to be one of the most fun elements of language
learning in the privacy and social safety of their own bedroom. To learn a language is to
invent yourself afresh; you will make decisions, consciously and unconsciously, about
precisely who you are when you are speaking this new tongue. As an English learner, you
decide whether or not to use things like the rhotic post-vocal R, and so you advance along
the virtual flowchart towards your new identity. Nobody can make these decisions for you;
they are profoundly personal.
The disadvantage of leaving a student alone in the forest of phonetics is that many of them
will choose the path of least resistance, otherwise known, in this case, as no path at all.
They sit down on a pile of leaves and decide that the embarrassment that comes with a
completely undeveloped accent is (and it truly is) less than the embarrassment of actually
attempting anything at all.
So, with all these challenges, how can we possibly begin to have a conversation about
phonetics? I can’t answer this question in its entirety, but I can begin to: let’s look at what the
majority of these dialects have in common. My favourite thing to talk about, in this regard, is
‘ə’. Most phonemes are referred to by their scientific classification, using a modular system
of impenetrable adjectives and nouns to tell you which parts of the vocal apparatus are
interacting with each other, such as the Voiced Alveolar Lateral Approximant, or the
Voiceless Labiodental Fricative. ə is different, because it has a name, and to quote the
legendary David Byrne, ‘…names make all the difference in the world’.
Meet my friend ə, The Schwa.
To pronounce the scwha, all you need to do is ask your deeper vocal components to do their
usual work to produce a vowel – any vowel, without having your mouth do any of the
necessary work to specify precisely which vowel. The resulting sound can be estimated to
constitute something close to half of all vowel instances in the English language, regardless
of dialect. How is this possible? To what letter does this phoneme correspond, and how can
it occur so frequently?
The answer, in reality, is that all written vowels may produce this sound, under certain
conditions. English is a lazy language. It values efficiency over all else; between the
disyllabic Germanic “Steep edge” and the more romantic “Vertiginous Precipice”, people will
opt for the former in 99 out of 100 cases. Having first reduced the number of syllables to the
reasonable minimum, the next logical step is reducing how many of the remaining ones we
elect to pronounce properly. The tonic, or stressed syllable will clearly be respected, but
virtually all other vowels in a given word are candidates for schwafication.
Take the word ‘Believable’, for example. Of the four vowel sounds heard in this word, three
of them are schwas; only the tonic ‘…liev…’ is truly enunciated. How would the hypothetical
words ‘Bilieveble’, ‘Bolievible’, ‘Bulievoble’ and ‘Balievuble’ be pronounced? Exactly the
same. They would be homophones, as much to each other as to the original ‘Believable’.
For anybody, be they student or teacher, who wishes to take their first few steps towards a
profound exploration of English phonetics, I really do feel that something as unique, integral
and cutely-named as the schwa is the most perfect place to start.
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