“Perfect English – that’s the way you heard it when you were growing up. For those of us lucky enough to live in the center of the universe, that pretty much means the Scandihoovian-tinged or Deutsch-inflected accents of Minnesota and North Dakota.
Thus the message was plenty clear last week when the owner of a West Acres fast-food outlet advised prospective job seekers: “We ask that you only apply if you are U.S.-born and speak English as your primary language.”
When it was pointed out to him that such a requirement is against federal law – complete with hefty fines from the Department of Labor – he quickly saw the light. He told WDAY he had not intended to “hurt anybody;” he only wanted to make sure his employees could communicate easily. (The shopping center, too, promptly apologized and disavowed his approach.)
An honest mistake, perhaps? Probably … but let’s ramp up the honesty a little bit farther. Sure, his help-wanted ad contradicts the American principle of equal opportunity, but it’s also fraught with logical potholes as big as Montana: Not all U.S.-born citizens, after all, speak Midwestern-style English. Nor do the half-billion global citizens who’ve babbled it since their cradle days necessarily sound like we do.
And a good many of our fellow citizens consider this to be a good thing. Please be advised that the rest of America already thinks we talk kinda funny up in this neck of the woods, doncha know then?
But a good share of our community’s discomfort with our New American neighbors boils down to not only race or religion or even their atrocious grammar … but to their unfamiliar accents.
I know you’ve overheard a shopper or two complain about a certain big-box store that’s known for staffing its check-out lines with a rainbow of employees: “I just can’t understand a word they say.”
Lazy bargain-seekers! In our little corner of the big, big world, we haven’t gotten used to making the extra effort to understand accents other than our own. Wrapped in our cozy cultural cocoon, we feel secure in assuming the problem can’t possibly be us. It’s them, for sure! They’re the problem …
… even when they’re talking to us in what is, in fact, our own language. We expect newcomers not only to instantly master English nouns, verbs and idioms, but to pronounce them exactly like us – we whose forebears did nothing more than beat them to North America.
Our own grandparents and great-grandparents would have been happy to set us straight. They sounded funny, too. The “old Americans” greeted waves of northern Europeans who washed over these plains with plenty of scoffing. Like them, we’ve been lulled by long familiarity into having lazy ears – ears that don’t lend themselves to listening harder.
It’s not just new English speakers. We suffer, on the whole, from lethargic listener syndrome.
One of my grandmothers was born to a Norwegian family that settled near Hillsboro, N.D., nearly 150 years ago. She could read and write in Norwegian before schoolteachers taught her English. She would marry a man who emigrated from near the Arctic Circle. He was 14 when he got off the cattle boat, alone, in Canada (according to family lore) and walked all the way to Traill County, where he went to work for a blacksmith.
Different time, different place – same situation. Like most North Dakota towns, the business district was populated with people who’d come to this continent considerably sooner. Picture bright, eager Grandma in school, scolded by hers teacher and teased by classmates for talking funny.
Imagine Grandpa standing for long, long hours at his forge – chatting easily with Norwegian farmers, but struggling to keep up with the city fathers. Can’t you feel him wincing at the “dumb Norwegian” jokes that passed for wit — Ole and Lena jokes that cut far deeper when they were literally aimed at your people working so hard to fit in.
Grandpa and Grandma never quite blended into the sound of standard Midwestern. Close, but not quite. But from the day their oldest son reached school age, they never again spoke their first language in front of the children (except when discussing grown-up matters better hidden from tender little ears).
My mother often told me, “They wanted their children to be American.” Somehow I always pictured the Stars and Stripes rippling in the breeze, Sousa marches and patriotic salutes. What I missed was the even deeper longing embedded in that dream: To not stand out when they spoke up. To go about their daily business without comment. To be taken for granted – no more, no less.
They craved the same ideal that newcomers long for today. To be understood. To fit in. No matter how much they may love the culture they’ve come from, they want to meld into the here and now. They want to have an ordinary day, an ordinary job, an ordinary trip to the grocery store – the luxury of not standing out, but just being taken for granted.
We can awaken our own lazy ears if we’re willing. It takes a little extra effort to decode distinctive accents and rhythms, even when the English is as pure as can be. I get it –New Yorkers strike me as harsh and aggressive, and southerners lackadaisical. Black urban speech goes right over my head until I concentrate … but no matter how easily we understand, or not, we’re all American born and bred.
In the end, what counts is attitude, not accent. The new Americans among us – whether they’re refugees or highly skilled professionals, international students or economic immigrants scaling the same barriers our own forebears faced — are immersed full-time in conquering our weird, wonderful patchwork language and our sometimes-baffling ways.
They’re throwing everything they’ve got into talking to us. Why not stretch just a little bit more … and catch it?
