One rule for L1 and another for L2 speakers…?

It occurred to me recently how differently the same utterance can be viewed depending on who utters it. It was simply a case of a noun which had been verbed which got me thinking. It’s not uncommon for me to say something like “I’m bus-ing today” (i.e. travelling by bus rather than walking), yet I find myself correcting non-native speakers if they utter more marginal constructions which are not part of standard English. I also found myself in the opposite situation when I once used ‘quoi’ at the end of a sentence in French. It can be used as a discourse particle to seek agreement or provide emphasis (Salzberg, 2019) which I picked up on my year abroad (e.g. ‘c’est cool, quoi!’), but when I used it, a French speaker told me that this usage was incorrect. I started to be much more cautious of using colloquial expressions in French after that!

It seems to me that we have double standards when it comes to informal and colloquial usage depending on the native-status of the speaker. Whilst, as a native speaker, I might be considered to be using language ‘creatively’ if I use colloquial or non-standard expressions, a non-native speaker would likely be told that it is simply ‘wrong’ and be discouraged from using it. Why do we expect second language learners to speak a more socially prestigious variety which is so different from the language native speakers use informally on a daily basis?

Studies into second language acquisition have found that informal language use by native speakers is associated with both positive outcomes (i.e. increased solidarity) and negative ones (i.e. considered less successful and intelligent) (DuBois, 2019). A recent study specifically into L2 use of colloquialisms also found that non-native speakers were similarly rated negatively, yet they did not benefit from any of the positive traits attributed to native speakers when using colloquialisms (DuBois, 2019). This makes sense to some extent because non-standard language often signals social identity and group-belonging (i.e. dialectal features show that you come from a certain place) (Bassiouney, 2017), but even if such features are used by L2 speakers, native speakers usually know straight away that they do not belong to the group from their accent.

Coming back to verbing nouns (I love how ‘verbing’ is an example of this itself!), this is certainly not a new phenomenon. People were talking about ‘verbification’ as long ago as the 1870s (Maddox, 2009; Grammarly, 2020), and I could list hundreds of commonly used verbs which started life as a noun (to table, to chair, to welcome, to pedal … etc etc). As with many linguistic innovations, some of these new additions are not embraced by all. Newspapers often contain letters and articles lamenting the decline of language and ‘nouns posing as verbs’ is no exception. One Guardian article goes on a rant about athletes using ‘to podium’ and ‘to medal’, suggesting instead that they stick to ‘be in the top three’ (Bouquet, 2018). However, the fact that some of these verbified nouns go unnoticed, yet others stand out and sound weird emphasises both the extent to which language changes over time and how arbitrary our notion of grammaticality really is.

Although English’s international status means many interactions take place between non-native speakers all over the world who do not feel the need to speak ‘like a native’, the aim of attaining native-like proficiency is still prevalent amongst learners (LemonGrad, 2020). But it seems L2 speakers simply can’t win. On the one hand they are taught that the target is to attain native-like proficiency and are judged for making mistakes, but if they start using too many colloquialisms they are judged negatively too! Maybe next time we hear something that sounds slightly unfamiliar in our native tongue, we will remember this and think about where our notions of grammaticality come from before condemning something as ‘wrong’.

References

Bassiouney, R. (2017). Identity and Dialect Performance. London: Routledge.

Bouquet, J. (2018). May I have a word about nouns posing as verbs? Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/21/may-i-have-a-word-about-nouns-posing-as-verbs [accessed 14/06/20]

DuBois (2019). Are L2 Speakers Allowed to Use Colloquialisms? L1 Attitudes Toward Spanish L2 Speakers' Use of Informal Lexical Items. Available at : https://search.proquest.com/openview/f77a22c467c036446a8fa3e4ee0d19c3/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y [accessed 14/06/20]

Grammarly. (2020). The basics of verbing nouns. Available at: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/the-basics-of-verbing-nouns/#:~:text=Verbing%2C%20or%20what%20grammarians%20refer,and%20to%2Dthe%2Dpoint. [accessed 14/06/20]

LemonGrad. (2020). English Language Statistics. Available at: https://lemongrad.com/english-language-statistics/ [accessed 14/06/20]

Maddox, M. (2009). Verbing nouns. Available at: https://www.dailywritingtips.com/verbing-nouns/ [accessed 14/06/20]

Salzberg, A. (2019). French together. Available at: https://frenchtogether.com/quoi/ [accessed 14/06/20]