A recent article in the New Zealand Listener compared the modern English language—with respect to how it is spoken in the United States—as being the “rock and roll” of languages. While this may seem like a compliment to some, historian Alan Posener suggests that the influences of everyone from Mickey Mouse to Snoop Dogg, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley have played their part in shaping how we speak English in America.
English, unlike some languages, is extremely elastic, which is wonderful for progressive-minded thinkers who love that we just invent words when and where we need them. But for those learning English as a second language, this can be a nightmare. And when you couple that elasticity with phonetics that make sense in no other mother tongue, ESL learners are bound to face challenges when they attempt to learn to pronounce American English properly.
Though English itself may seem the happy accident of Scandinavians commiserating and battling the speakers of the Romance languages so many centuries ago, it’s no happy accident that we native speakers in the USA continue to allow the language to evolve, sometimes to questionable places, like the world of text messaging—a topic some English scholars cannot bear the thought of!
As someone new to learning American English, you must keep an open mind—while it’s definitely messy, it’s also liberating. The freedom we enjoy as a nation reverberates in our freedom to speak in ways that may take time to make sense, and may be hard to pronounce if you’re trying to reduce your accent. But in the end, American English is an ever-changing zeitgeist, like so many of the people who come here to enjoy the land of opportunity with all its privileges and challenges.
