Walking the dog? Or walkin’ the dog?
Language learners living alongside native speakers need to cope
with the variation that native speakers use quite unconsciously. For example,
if you are a native speaker of English, you probably don’t notice that you vary
your pronunciation of the –ing in
words like walking or ceiling in very systematic ways, using ‘in’, for example, more often if you are
male, more often when you are speaking informally, and more often when –ing is part of a verb. Language learners are not taught that
this is what native speakers do, but have to work it out for themselves.
Research summarised in a previous posting looked at how
Polish adult learners of English dealt with variation in –ing, which does not exist in Polish (http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.fr/2012/07/staying-or-goin.html
). In another study, Miriam
Meyerhoff and Erik
Schleef’s research focuses on teenage migrants from Poland to the UK. They
found that some patterns of variation are easier to acquire than others and
that, surprisingly, it is the social patterning that seems to be the most
difficult.
Working in Edinburgh and London, the researchers recorded roughly
the same number of locally born and Polish-born teenagers speaking both
formally – reading out a written
passage – and more informally, in conversation with a friend and a researcher.
The Polish teenagers had been living in the UK between seven months and five
years, and had little exposure to English while in Poland.
The Polish teenagers had acquired only a few of the local
native speakers’ patterns of variation. For example, in London, locally-born teenagers were more
likely to pronounce –ing as ‘in’ after a previous /k/ or /g/; so they
said, for example, I’ve been cookin’
more often than I’ve been eatin’. The
Polish teenagers in London did the same.
However, other patterns seemed more difficult to acquire. Unlike
native speakers elsewhere in the world, for some reason teenagers in Edinburgh
and London do not use the ‘ing’ pronunciation
more often in verbs than nouns. However, the Polish teenagers do. Meyerhoff and
Schleef suggest that perhaps they are influenced by a wider range of English
speakers than their locally born school friends (TV may be important, for
instance); perhaps, too, language learners need more time to learn the complex
patterns of language variation they hear from the native speakers around them before
they can start to use the variation themselves in their everyday speech.
Surprisingly, the Polish learners did not use ‘in’ more often in informal conversation
than when reading aloud, though the locally born teenagers did so, in both
London and Edinburgh. The Polish learners also behaved differently when it came
to the gender pattern of variation. In London, the pattern was the other way
round to the expected, local one. London-born boys used ‘in’ more frequently than the girls, as expected, but for the Polish-born
boys in London it was the ‘ing’ pronunciation
that was more frequent. In Edinburgh, the social factor that affected the
pronunciation the most for the Polish teenagers was not gender but the type of
friendship network.
Why should there be a difference in social patterns of
variation between the language learners and the native speakers? Meyerhoff and
Schleef stress that the Polish teenagers are competent speakers of English,
even if they are not yet fully proficient. Part of their language competence,
they suggest, must involve recognising that native speakers vary their pronunciation
of –ing and that this variation is used
to mark social information. They are not yet proficient enough in English to recognise
exactly how the native speakers do this, so instead they make sense of the
variation by using it to mark social categories that for this age group attract
a high degree of attention: gender and friendship networks.
_________________________________________________________
Meyerhoff, Miriam and Schleef, Erik (2012) Variation,
contact and social indexicality in the acquisition of (ing) by teenage
migrants. Journal of Sociolinguistics
16: 398-416.
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00535.x
This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.