John Linton .....and every other living thing on the planet.....and every other human being when you come to think of it.
I don't know whether you take any notice of languages or the effect they have on you when you hear different languages spoken.....I do and have always done so for as long as I can remember. When Annette and I were in France for a few days earlier this year I was, again, reminded how much nicer spoken French sounds and even how much nicer English spoken with a French accent sounds than my Australianised rendition of English. I think the most beautiful sounding language is Italian followed by Spanish and then Portugese - each of those languages sounds, at least to me, so much more 'melodious' than spoken English - even of the type spoken by the great English stage actors. Our harsh and brutal germanic origin words with their crude pronunciations are pretty awful in the country of their origin and even worse in the Australian versions.
Leaving aside the education problems of the last 50 or so years which means that I have difficulty understanding the vocabulary now used in some large parts of Sydney the actual pronunciation of words I do understand often means I have to struggle to work out what is being said outside my own home and 'Anglo Saxon' working environment. Australia's pursuit of multi-culturism over several decades has made it very difficult to fully and completely understand what a growing percentage of people in this country say when they speak their version of Australian English. Anyone who has worked in a call centre would know that a growing percentage of callers are very, very difficult to understand - some are just impossible.....all claim that it is the call centre's employees that are the problem - not them. There is a small, but growing, number of people who 'demand' to speak to a Chinese or other language speaking CSR.
'Regular' Australians seem to have a particular difficulty with "Indian" accents. I have previously commented that even the most meticulously spoken English by highly educated people whose first language is from the sub continent (and by general ignorant extension Sri Lanka) is deemed 'difficult' to understand, not because of vocabulary or syntax or grammar, but because of cadence/rhythm and syllable emphasis. I was particularly aware of how this was a problem by spending those few days in France and being reminded that the French cadence when applied to English dramatically improved the sound of the same words spoken by someone who had never known any other language other than 'English'.
This lead to me discussing the issue when I went to Sri Lanka recently with the new General Manager and we met with three different English language 'school' representatives. She subsequently selected a fourth English language trainer. Of the original three, one of them fully understood the issue (of cadence) I raised and had a 'standard' course that addressed that exact issue - obviously it is a known issue - not just casually observed by me. So yesterday we held the first training session in an ongoing program of improving, not the quality of the "English" spoken by our Colombo employees, but how it sounds to Australian English speakers. How successful will this program be? I don't know - when I think of the spectrum of "English" spoken in Australia it would be impossible to under estimate the magnitude of such a task.
We must find a way of measuring/tracking progress as time goes by.
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