Did you, by any chance, come across a recent drug commercial on one popular music streaming platform where the assumed guy performs a fake German accent? If you haven’t or arghed! either as I did — not only because the male voice speaks in a fake accent, but also that the linguistic pretense grates on one’s ears in an openly racist, sexist, and capitalistically opportunistic manner — continue reading, nevertheless. Even if you haven’t seen the movie Sorry to Bother You from 2018, feel free to scroll down.
Unsure of the exact timeline of the commercial, let me speculate that the US and Germany collaboration on one anti-Covid vaccine has had its impact on the marketing strategies of the US based pharmaceutical company. Associating the drug with Germany using a high-pitched male voice that pretends to speak English as a second language with a German accent, the said company cunningly tries to hook the pandemic anxious listener-customer. It could also be a targeted localized commercial since I happen to live in Wisconsin. One cannot help but ponder the possibilities with which language is entangled in racialized and gendered ways in everyday products and practices, and wow at how profoundly a marketing strategist comprehends language making at times better than some white academics working with similar European languages.
I teach a less commonly taught, and according to first and only language English speakers, a very foreign non-European language to undergraduate and graduate students, and culturally related content courses (in English) to undergraduate students in a major European languages department with predominantly white faculty members at a public research university.
All my undergraduate and graduate work has been in Literary Studies; so, I’m not trained in SLA (Second Language Education), nor do I have background in linguistics. I have come to learn language pedagogical theory initially from practice; that is, I first immersed myself in teaching language and learnt theory on the way. This was not a choice; rather, the way things unfolded as a graduate worker. And it should sound familiar to graduate students in language and literature departments most of whom are funded through teaching languages (not literatures they might be specializing in) writ large. Throughout the many years in language teaching practice, I’ve followed language pedagogy research more in line with my own interest in social justice education as supplement to in-class teaching.
I should perhaps add here that I’ve only been interested in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics since I’m extremely wary of essentialist narratives about the language as a system and of cognitive approaches to language learning. Anything grand cognitive gives me chills by conjuring eugenics. [In the meantime, if you’re as skeptical about cognitive language studies as I am, I’m reading this enchanting book called Personality Brokers about the curious history of the Myers-Briggs personality test.]
Since I teach a language, I’m also involved in the university’s language learning support center, and as part of a recent year-long seminar, we read and discussed cutting edge language pedagogy research to change (i.e., decolonize) the language teaching curricula. The group was mixed with white and BIPOC instructors teaching hegemonic and non-hegemonic languages in the university. Teaching a non-hegemonic language as a non-black woman from the global majority, I sensed at times that the discussion about decoloniality didn’t really address me but more white instructors teaching both hegemonic and non-hegemonic languages. I, however, learnt profusely from the readings thematically ranging from raciolinguistic ideologies to Universal Design and Intercultural Competence to translanguaging, which we tried to link empirically to our own language teaching practices. I also broadened my conceptual vocabulary in the field, and yet I noticed I was already familiar with some of the concepts these language scholars used in their articles.
As a teacher and scholar who is trying to bridge the superficial gap between the disciplines of language and literary studies, I was quite struck, perhaps to my ignorance, to see how frequently the recent SLA scholarship in the context of (trans)languaging borrowed from the Russian philosopher and literary critic M. M. Bakhtin’s article entitled “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35) particularly from its terminology such as heteroglossia and monoglossia, which Bakhtin coined to theorize novelistic discourse many decades ago. I knew this vocabulary well since I used Bakhtin’s famous theory in my dissertation a few years ago. One of the arguments of the article cut short for our purposes here is that there is no such thing as singular language in the novel nor in the already socio-ideological world but languages. And there is no language devoid of context because it is already filled with intentions (read accents, assumptions, bias, etc.) once it’s uttered. It’s hard not to admire such contemporary approach to language at the zenith of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century.
From this perspective, the drug commercial sending a message through a pretentious German accent is a consciously political act. What the marketing strategists of the pharma company are well aware is that a lay listener’s linguistic repertoire is already filled with positive bias (Bakhtin) towards certain hegemonic languages. What is striking to me is that time and again I’ve come to realize that these professionals outside the academia are better competent in sociolinguistics and raciolinguistic ideologies than some naïve white scholars I’ve encountered in academia who are trained in hegemonic (European) languages and literatures. At this point with plethora of articles out there on the subject area, it hardly seems to be a genuine naivete but a performative one as if intentionally enacting willing suspension of disbelief outside of fiction in equal statutes of languages and their speakers.
As academics, shouldn’t we always stick to research we uphold so highly not only when it’s convenient but also when it’s discomfiting, and to the reality it points to in Real Life?*
*Also recommended reading
