“We better make sure our child doesn’t talk like you, otherwise he’ll sound dumber,” jokes the husband of Linda Drijvers, a cognitive neuroscientist and psycholinguist at the Max Planck Institute. “I know the prejudices that can surround dialects,” explains the Brabant native in accentless Dutch. “And still I was surprised to see the major consequences pronunciation can have.”
Drijvers mentions the scene in By the Throat where a Palestinian taxi driver bursts into tears after realising that he was detained for seventeen years at the Tel Aviv airport because of how he answered the question, ‘How are you?’. The documentary is full of stories just like this. From a Flemish actor who is denied certain roles due to his Ghent accent to Northern Irish man who was beaten after his pronunciation of the letter ‘H’ gave him away as Catholic.
Language shame and language pride
During InScience, Drijvers will host a programme based on the documentary together with Jos Swanenberg, professor of Diversity in Language and Culture at Tilburg University. “Dialects from Brabant, Limburg, the Achterhoek and Nijmegen are all represented here in Nijmegen. We’re curious about their experiences. We discuss a quote from a man who wants to learn how to speak without an accent to improve his odds of finding work in the Randstad. Do more people struggle with their dialect? To what extent do they experience language shame?”
While the theme of the documentary does not coincide perfectly with Drijvers’ field of expertise - how the brain responds to face-to-face communication - there are similarities. “Jos specialises in dialects and accents and my job will mainly be to ask him questions, but we’ll also try to find common ground in our respective research fields. One research study explored whether it helps to put a face to the dialect you are hearing. People find it easier to understand how a speaker forms words and sentences when they can see them speak.”
Good people
Whereas By the Throat primarily focuses on the negative effects of pronunciation, Drijvers and Swanenberg also highlight language pride and the positive side of different dialects during InScience. “Dialects foster a sense of solidarity and belonging; they bring people together. To people from Brabant, for example, a soft ‘G’ is associated with goei volk or ‘good people.’”
According to Drijvers, insights like these highlight the importance of language analysis in cultural, political and social contexts. “The documentary reveals that overly simplistic analyses and prejudices about dialects can have serious consequences. To me, this is the most important take-away of By the Throat. Don’t judge people for their accents, but enjoy the beauty of different dialects.
Photo: Eduardo Davad via Pixabay