Most of my professional life has been concerned with teaching English as a foreign language. In recent years I have been concentrating on pronunciation, both productively and receptively: that is to say, finding ways to help foreign learners be more easily understood when they speak English, as well as helping them to understand spoken English.

What has happened, over the years, is that I have stopped expecting my students to sound like me. Many years ago the great phonetician David Abercrombie coined the phrase ‘comfortable intelligibility’ as a worthwhile aim; in other words it doesn’t matter that you are clearly not a native speaker when using a given language, provided that other people can understand you pretty well.

At a conference in the English Department of the University of Vienna some time ago, one of the staff (speaking with a faultless RP accent) recalled that, as students, they were ‘expected to sound more English than the English’.  Well, this is no longer mandatory, much to the relief of the vast majority of teachers for whom English is not a native language.

In fact a native or near-native like command of the sound system of a foreign language can cause problems, as I can attest from my own experience of studying languages. In my case it is because my attempts at reproducing the sound system of a new language (the intonation, as well as the individual phonemes) far outstrip my ability, for example, to store and retrieve appropriate vocabulary, generalise the most important ways of combining words, understand native speakers and so on.

In the early 1980s, back from my first holiday with Jane on a little Greek island, I promptly set about learning the language. The following September, we went off to the island of Symi, and discovered next day that the little house we were renting had a barbecue; all that we needed was some charcoal.  My dictionary informed me that what I had to buy sounded something like ‘karvouna’.  Easy enough to remember; cognate with ‘carbon’, French ‘charbon’ and so on.  So off I set to the little port where we had arrived the night before.

Now, had I, on accosting the man I met on reaching the village, spoken fairly slowly, without trying to sound too Greek, and come out with the equivalent of, say, ‘ I want buy charcoal, sir’, not only would he have understood me, but he would have slowed right down, chosen his words carefully, perhaps even accompanying me to the appropriate shop.  I, however, right little Jack the lad, rattled off something closer to ‘Excuse me, sir, do you happen to know where they sell charcoal?’, which elicited a rapid string of (to me) unintelligible Greek, from which I could pick out nothing but the word for charcoal, doubtless something along the lines of ‘Charcoal?  Yeah, Stelios sells charcoal. No, hang about; he used to but I don’t think he sells it now. You could try Clytemenestra’s grocery. Second, no I tell a lie, third on the right.’

Eventually, of course, I did find some charcoal, after asking three different people. But I was really using a form of triangulation - like wartime German intelligence tracking down the source of radio transmissions in France - rather than any sort of language skills.

Mind you, even cutting out anything too complex, and slowing right down, is no guarantee that your carefully prepared bit of language will elicit the expected response.  Here is Stelios, with a limited knowledge of English, ready to order a drink in an English pub.

Stelios:                         Gin and tonic please.

Expected response:    A gin and tonic.

Actual response:        Ice and lemon?

Stelios:                         No, gin and tonic.

I actually triggered the ‘ice and lemon response’ the very first time I produced a whole sentence in Dutch, on holiday in Amsterdam, some time before I had started learning the language.  It was over Christmas, and a friend told me that the Hema department store cafeteria served excellent ‘erwtensoep’ (pea soup, with bits of sausage); just the thing to warm you up on a cold winter day.

I checked in my phrase book how to say ‘two’ and ‘please’ in

Dutch and found that ‘erwtensoep’ sounded rather like ‘airtensoup’.  That was enough I thought. No point in trying to find out what the plural of ‘erwtensoep’ was, since the use of  ‘two’ made any plural ending redundant, whatever the rules of grammar might say. So, up I went to the counter, and kicked off the following exchange.

Michael:                         Twee erwtensoep, alstublieft.

Expected response:      Two bowls of pea-soup

Actual response:          Groot of kleen?

Luckily, this was so close to the German ‘Gross oder klein?’ (‘Big or small?’) that I was able to produce the following:

New response:             Groot, alstublieft.

Without my German to help me, however, I might have been in trouble. Maybe not, though.  The woman would have supplemented her words with gesture, probably pointing to the two different sized bowls.

The point is this: be prepared to have a go with even a limited amount of the language when traveling abroad; and don’t worry about making the odd mistake.  A smattering of the language is better for you than not making any kind of an effort, convinced that everyone speaks English. And if you really believe that then, sadly, you had better not stray from where the other tourists hang out.  For if you head a mile or so inland from the coast, say, you’re likely to find yourself adrift in a monolingual world.