"The whole world is full of refugees - just like you and just like me."
This is a line from the The Everlasting, a great song that I heard performed live by the Manic Street Preachers. The line has haunted me for several weeks as refugees, mainly from Syria, began arriving in Europe. Many people watched the news and wondered what they could do to help. People immediately organised marches and began collecting items to donate to those in need. The mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, organised the benefit concert With Love From Liverpool on 19 September to raise money. The band Crowded House will also release their song Help Is Coming to raise funds for the cause. I've pre-ordered a vinyl limited-edition copy and bought two tickets for the Liverpool gig. A few clicks online to buy a couple of things is the least I could do. Some people have even offered refugees accommodation in their own homes. Germans, in particular, have shown humbling humanitarianism.
Many other people, however, are engaged in cynical semantic antics online to muddle the narrative by differentiating - unhelpfully - between the terms 'migrant' and 'refugee', presumably as a justification for their own inaction. Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole wrote a very helpful piece, Migrants are welcome, the second section of which explains just how irrelevant these labels are in this case. Yet the shoulder-shruggers in the Great British Shake-Off believe that we should put our own homeless citizens first.
Irrespective of any criticism of the UK government's response to this or any other crisis, its pledge to home 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next five years will reportedly be funded from the foreign aid budget; so will not affect any support for the UK's homeless at all. The response of private individuals to the plight of the refugees is a matter for them. As a result, the "we" in the pleas for us to first look after our own suddenly becomes a "you".
What have YOU done personally to help the UK's homeless this week? If you've constructed this UK vs Syria either-or scenario and are unsure of how to proceed, allow me to make a couple of suggestions. These are in addition to calling on your politicians to do more for the homeless - which you're obviously already doing:
1. Empty your spare room/home of all the items you no longer use, sell them and give the money to a UK homeless person to help them find temporary accommodation and help. In the interests of fairness to the Syrians; this person should have lost all their possessions and ID, and should have no access to sustenance, sanitation or state or charitable assistance of any kind. They should also have been forced to flee from a war zone here in the UK. They will have watched loved ones die, either at the hands of others, or else on a perilous journey across the whole country, lasting weeks or months before reaching a place of safety.
2. Having now created more space in your home, offer to house a Syrian refugee temporarily. Alternatively, you can buy the charity single, go to the gig or support the refugees in some other small way.
Is this what you mean by putting the UK first? If it is, then by your own rationale, you should put Syrian refugees second, surely? Or is the plight of thousands of displaced refugees even further down your list of urgent causes to support? Of course, many charities need our help. But if you firmly believe in supporting people in the UK at the expense of, not in addition to, others in desperate need elsewhere; may I respectfully suggest that while the rest of us do what we can to help, you find some other, anti-social media on which to air your unhelpful opinions.
Showing posts with label Liverpool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liverpool. Show all posts
Friday, 11 September 2015
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Bonjour, Monsieur Barton!
Not being a fan of football, I'd never felt compelled to write about it in relation to language – until now. This is because today we learn of Liverpool-born footballer Joey Barton, currently on a 12-month stint in Marseille, has seemingly adopted a French accent in his own speech and, by extension, the speech patterns of native French people when they speak English. C'est incroyable, ne c'est pas? Well, when you listen to the clip of him speaking, it's not incredible at all; it's perfectly understandable. And that's the point!
The practice of modifying your speech when conversing with others who do not have the same first language as you is known as speech accommodation. It would be very easy to infer that Barton is now deliberately ridiculing his French hosts through his speech. I disagree.
Let's look at the evidence: Joey Barton naturally has a very strong Liverpool accent. Though I have studied French but have never lived there, it seems logical to me that if a Scouse footballer moves to Marseille in southern France, initially at least, he'll encounter a few problems communicating and fitting in. So since his arrival in September, if he's not yet managed to let his feet do the talking, and has yet to learn French; he will have consciously and subconsciously modified his own speech to make himself understood.
Here are just a few features I noticed during the first 30 seconds of an extract from his interview:
"Yesterday I make one tackle, all everybody speak about is this tackle [...]"
Typical of the Liverpool accent, the words make, speak and tackle are all pronounced with the /x/ phoneme (as in the Scottish word loch) rather than with the hard /k/ phoneme. Some later instances of speak are pronounced with a hard /k/, however.
"that"
Again, the initial consonant sound of that is almost a /d/, rather than a /ð/, as lampooned in the rhetorical question "They do do that though, don't they, though?", where all consonant sounds at the beginnings of all words in that sentence are pronounced in exactly the same way for comic effect (by comedian Harry Enfield and previously, in the film Yellow Submarine).
"I'm a little bit bored from the English media."
Here the /t/ phoneme in little is pronounced; whereas Barton would normally omit this sound and replace it with a glottal stop /ʔ/, which is exactly what happens in the following word bit. No French person speaking English would ever use a glottal stop in this way, so we can speculate that Barton is subconsciously copying (not ridiculing) his French colleagues before reverting to his native speech style the closer he gets to the words English media!
But just as no French person would use glottal stops in their English; a native English speaker would instinctively know about subject-predicate agreement (see "all everybody speak about" in the first sentence above). Similarly, in the second sentence, an English native speaker would use the preposition with or by but never from with the word bored. Based on these initial features, I'd say that Barton is not out to ridicule the French. He has merely assimilated their speech style through his contact with them. That being the case, the English media should – just for once – leave the guy alone.
The practice of modifying your speech when conversing with others who do not have the same first language as you is known as speech accommodation. It would be very easy to infer that Barton is now deliberately ridiculing his French hosts through his speech. I disagree.
Let's look at the evidence: Joey Barton naturally has a very strong Liverpool accent. Though I have studied French but have never lived there, it seems logical to me that if a Scouse footballer moves to Marseille in southern France, initially at least, he'll encounter a few problems communicating and fitting in. So since his arrival in September, if he's not yet managed to let his feet do the talking, and has yet to learn French; he will have consciously and subconsciously modified his own speech to make himself understood.
Here are just a few features I noticed during the first 30 seconds of an extract from his interview:
"Yesterday I make one tackle, all everybody speak about is this tackle [...]"
Typical of the Liverpool accent, the words make, speak and tackle are all pronounced with the /x/ phoneme (as in the Scottish word loch) rather than with the hard /k/ phoneme. Some later instances of speak are pronounced with a hard /k/, however.
"that"
Again, the initial consonant sound of that is almost a /d/, rather than a /ð/, as lampooned in the rhetorical question "They do do that though, don't they, though?", where all consonant sounds at the beginnings of all words in that sentence are pronounced in exactly the same way for comic effect (by comedian Harry Enfield and previously, in the film Yellow Submarine).
"I'm a little bit bored from the English media."
Here the /t/ phoneme in little is pronounced; whereas Barton would normally omit this sound and replace it with a glottal stop /ʔ/, which is exactly what happens in the following word bit. No French person speaking English would ever use a glottal stop in this way, so we can speculate that Barton is subconsciously copying (not ridiculing) his French colleagues before reverting to his native speech style the closer he gets to the words English media!
But just as no French person would use glottal stops in their English; a native English speaker would instinctively know about subject-predicate agreement (see "all everybody speak about" in the first sentence above). Similarly, in the second sentence, an English native speaker would use the preposition with or by but never from with the word bored. Based on these initial features, I'd say that Barton is not out to ridicule the French. He has merely assimilated their speech style through his contact with them. That being the case, the English media should – just for once – leave the guy alone.
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