The applied linguistics challenge
TWO NATIVE SPEAKERS
The novel Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee (1995) has the classic theme of the individual caught between two worlds, the immigrant insider-outsider. Lee himself was born in Korea in 1965 and emigrated to the USA at age three. Like him the protagonist of the novel, Henry Park, is a Korean American, equally proficient in English and Korean. When Park first meets the American woman who becomes his wife, he tells her:
‘People like me are always thinking about still having an accent.’
‘I can tell’ she said.
I asked her how.
‘You speak perfectly, of course. I mean if we were talking on the phone I wouldn’t think twice.’
‘You mean it’s my face.’
‘No, it’s not that’ she answered … ‘Your face is part of the equation, but not in the way you’re talking. You look like someone listening to himself. You pay attention to what you’re doing. If I had to guess, you’re not a native speaker. Say something.
‘What should I say?’
‘Say my name.’
‘Lelia’ I said, ‘Lelia.’
‘See? You said Leel-ya so deliberately. You tried not to but you were taking in the sound of the syllables. You’re very careful.’ (Lee 1995: 11)
Let’s assume that Henry Park is a native speaker of English. He is also, it appears, a native speaker of Korean. As such he inhabits this in-between world, interpreting the one to the other and spying on both. No wonder, then, that he works in his day-job as a spy:
We casually spoke of ourselves as business people [but] in a phrase we were spies … each of us engaged our own kind, more or less. Foreign workers, immigrants, first generationals, neo-Americans. I worked with Koreans … there were no other firms with any ethnic coverage to speak of. The same reason the CIA had such shoddy intelligence in non-white countries … typically, the subject was a well-to-do immigrant supporting some political insurgency in his old land … we worked by continuing intricate and open-ended emotional conspiracies. We became acquaintances, casual friends. Sometimes lovers … Then we wrote the tract of their lives, remote unauthorized biographies. (ibid: 15, 16)
Henry Park, then, is a bilingual native speaker: while the saliency of his appearance may cause some initial doubts as to his being a native speaker of English, on the telephone there is no such uncertainty. Remember what his wife says: ‘if we were talking on the phone, I wouldn’t think twice’ (ibid 11).
John Banville, the Irish novelist, is a different kind of native speaker, marked by absence rather than presence. When he spoke in 2005 at the Edinburgh Book Festival, he made reference to the language used by Irish writers. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we are not writing in our own language.’ What he meant was that the true language of the Irish is Irish Gaelic and when Irish writers write in English (even though they may have no Gaelic themselves) somehow what they are doing is writing a Gaelicized English where the thought patterns are not English but ‘really’ Irish. Now while I accept that the English of Ireland is marked and no doubt influenced by features of Irish Gaelic, the idea that English is not the language of the Irish seems to me perverse. Indeed, I asked Banville whether he would make a similar claim for Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, the Scots, the Welsh, not to mention Indians, Singaporeans etc. He prevaricated. Of course, he had not meant to be taken so literally and indeed part of his prevarication was the Irish delight in their English use of ambiguity. He meant that the English of Ireland (and especially the spoken English) has been influenced by Irish Gaelic. That seems to me indisputable. He could also be interpreted as alluding to the question of what is meant by English and would, had he been engaged in more than an aside, perhaps have reminded himself and us that variation within England has, at its extremes, lects as different as Irish – but different from what? For that indeed is the subject I address.
Alternatively what Banville could very properly have meant was that there is a Standard Written Irish English which is different from Standard Written British English, different in the sense that Standard Australian, Standard American etc. English are different. Again, this seems to me incontestable. But if he meant that, then he could not possibly have also meant that English is not Irish; that Irish English is not British English is true, but that Irish English is Irish is also true.
