Who owns language?

With apologies for the very long silence, owing to work and other commitments, I return with a simple question for you: Who owns language? As I try to keep up to date with news and current affairs, it seems that people are becoming increasingly aware and concerned with language use and whether certain terms are appropriate. As always, the specific context is crucial, as is any perceived or actual offence – a relative concept that I touched on in a previous blog post.

The latest example of this concerns a term at matches involving Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, where any fans caught using a specific Jewish-related term could be arrested or face being banned from matches. Football authorities are quite rightly taking all steps necessary to kick racism out of the national game, though the caveat from the UK Prime Minister – such that action only be taken if the term is used as an insult – is important.

This is because some fans seem to use the term to refer to themselves as a 'badge of honour', in defiance of advice from police. This raises interesting questions about the intention to offend, as well as my question about the ownership of language. If an offensive or racist term is appropriated as an identity marker by the social or ethnic group it previously denigrated, can this term – in this specific context, at least – still be deemed offensive to that group? In the context of rival football fans at games (and even friends' Facebook posts prior to fixtures), where insults and chants – often euphemistically termed 'banter' – are commonplace; the line between bravado and offence is blurred.

I'm reminded of a similar news item earlier this year in Germany, when a father, reading aloud to his daughter, took offence at the presence of the n-word in a popular children's book. His actions sparked a national debate, resulting in the publisher agreeing to expunge the term from future editions – a move that was also welcomed by the book's author shortly before his death. The sad footnote to this example, however, was that both the father and his daughter experienced a backlash. It's also annoying when people persistently invoke the "political correctness gone mad" argument as a means of justifying the continued use of offensive terms.

My own feeling remains that offence is relative – so it's better to avoid using certain terms than risk offending someone, even unwittingly. That's precisely what political correctness is. At the same time, we have to recognise that no-one owns language or its use. Language in all its forms is only a mutually agreed form of expression which is subject to change over time. That's why policing its use is difficult, if not impossible. But if we modify our own language use, then we signify to others that we are aware of – and are sensitive to – its power. To the extent that we are also role models to those around us, what we say is as important as what we do.

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.