March 12, 2024 Read Time:
This is an expanded version of a column I wrote for the university newspaper, which gives me 350 words–enough to introduce an idea, not enough to develop it. The headline of the original post was “Vocabulary lesson: accommodation.”
As you know, I speak and write English natively.* But I’d like to tell you how I use English differently in the international context of this university, with lots of non-native users of English. I speak a bit more slowly, for one thing. I consciously use high-frequency words. And I don’t do the sort of verbal play that I do with my family (where, for instance, you pick up an inadvertent rhyme and build on it, or you bend a joke in the direction of a joke on a separate topic you told yesterday, or you sing the grocery list in the tune of a song, and on and on.)
I also try to remove idiomatic expressions from my speech and writing. However, the other day, I slipped. In an email, I wrote about “taking the temperature” of a group, and the recipient of my message didn’t grasp the idiom immediately. Later I changed it to “assess,” in order to remove the impression that there’s illness.
I simplify my syntax too. Once, a couple of years ago, in a reviewing exercise for Horizon Europe, I wrote a sentence that was structured like, “Monday was a sunny day, Tuesday rainy.” The goal was informational efficiency and reducing grammatical redundancy. But this ellipsis–that’s the name for this rhetorical pattern–confused the person in charge of the reviewing session, who was a highly-educated European Commission bureaucrat.
“You are a native speaker of English, aren’t you?” they asked me, with a measure of hostility. As my sentence was perfectly grammatical, I was the one to be confused. I had always stayed away from very low frequency sentence structures; now I made sure to. (I do this in my column too, which gives my prose a plain style quality, one I don’t bend toward.)
Another interesting change that goes largely unchecked: In the homelands of English, advice about writing usually dictates that the writer should use words with Anglo-Saxon roots. They’re shorter, for one thing. Also punchier. But in this environment, the better choice is often words with Latin or Greek roots, even though they have more syllables. That’s because they’re cognate with more other European mother tongues, so the texts are more accessible.
A couple of things about these sorts of subtle shifts of language use: As a native user of English, I have a lot of experience with non-natives, in many contexts, that started in my early 20s. Working in journalism, graduate school, living outside of Anglophone contexts, teaching and consulting, I quickly picked up the tools and expectations of linguistic accommodation. How you assess someone’s understanding. How you add another element of monitoring to your milliseconds of speech planning. How you have to think about producing language instead of just doing it. I don’t say all of this to brag, but merely to point out that it’s an inheritance of the Anglophone. Maybe you can consider it baggage, maybe an asset. (You’ll allow me an ellipsis, here on my own blog.) Either way it’s an effort. A tiny bit of friction. It accumulates.
One thing is certain: probably a small proportion of speakers of a language like Dutch, with all of its 23 or so million speakers, ever encounter non-native speakers, and those who do rarely have enough sustained exposure that requires that they develop a suite of reductions, alterations, and simplifications, except when they’re talking to their children and perhaps the elderly. If you’ll allow me a broad linguistic stereotype, I think this accommodation is culturally difficult within the context of Dutch interactions. In fact, this may be the source of the preference for using English in interactions–rather than shift to a different register of Dutch and experience a bit of friction in one’s own mental processes, one switches to an entirely different language. This is conjecture on my part; I have no proof, though am certain that someone’s done relevant sociolinguistic research.
I also want to note that the discourse about building a bilingual Dutch-English environment at the university is absent any of this recognition. Both in the broader political discussion and in the specific policy recommendations, including ones made by the universities themselves, there is the goal of “using more Dutch,” without any discussion of which register of Dutch will get used. (To be fair, there’s little discussion of any of this in institutions in the US, where never is a language policy articulated whatsoever.) The policy at my university is often stated as “you can use any language that you want, as long as it’s English or Dutch,” and I have been in more than a few meetings that depend on everyone’s receptive skills–everyone gets to speak their mother tongue that way. Freedom, right? Except that this only works if there’s a certain linguistic accommodation in both directions. It won’t work if people bring the same Dutch (or English) to the meetings that they would use at home. So how do you achieve this?
Another observation: Some writers (I’m not going to look this up now) have mentioned the near-ubiquitous use of English on signage on campus. When Dutch appears, what is it? I think of a word here or there on doors (duwen, trekken), also the poem-mural on an exterior wall of the library. Over time, as my Dutch gets better, I’m able to parse more and more of this poem. I’ve used encounters with it as a sort of metric of my abilities. But if you don’t know Dutch at all, this poem presents a wall. Opaque, unscaleable. I’m all for poetry and text and walls, but when it comes to language on the landscape, surely there’s a workable middle ground between duwen and poetry.
It's a pity that there's no vocabulary for all of this in the multilingual environment, because it makes invisible the linguistic accommodations that we already make–and which all of us will have to learn to do, and more often. It also puts out of reach the sort of linguistic work that some of us do in service of an inclusive environment where everyone understands each other, most of the time, and feels comfortable fixing the misunderstandings. It occurs to me that a term from disability activist Mia Mingus, “access intimacy,” might be relevant here. She wrote:
Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access. Some of the people I have experienced the deepest access intimacy with (especially able bodied people) have had no education or exposure to a political understanding of disability.
I’ m not saying that being a non-native user of a language is a disability; I’m saying that the non-native user has myriad opportunities to experience the absence of someone’s attention to their linguistic accessibility. So that if and when that attention arrives, when it’s signaled, then people can relax. That’s just between people with hearing abilities, without other communicative impairments, who usually have the wherewithal to repair an interaction, ask for clarification, and so forth, and who don’t have to battle ableist assumptions and perspectives. As an aside, I call this environment very inaccessible for anyone with a vision, mobility, or hearing impairment. Even pointing out basic aspects of it, like use of color in presentations, is considered weird. The point is, having to ask for clarification about an idiom once in a while is a privilege. Many people would love to have a barrier that sized.
During my first year in the Netherlands, another American academic gave me a tip. Whenever non-native English speakers walk into a room, they are instantly judging each other–and being judged–about their English abilities. As a native user, your job is to assure them that their English is excellent, that they’ve already achieved so much working at a high level in what is a second, third or even fourth language. So now I say this often in trainings, and when I edit people’s work. It’s important that they know that often my feedback would be the same even if they were native users.
Being bilingual isn’t only about your knowledge of two linguistic codes, it’s also about your awareness of who you’re addressing and what their language needs are likely to be. Will this change your Dutch? Of course. Will this change my English? Of course – it already has.
* I can also read French and Spanish at a B1 level, and at one point was a B1 speaker of Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. I'm a B1 reader of Dutch and an A2 speaker--not bad for someone who didn't start until he was 51 years old. I've also studied Russian and Esperanto, as I chronicled in my book, Babel No More.