“Yes, I must take great pains with my speech, because I shall be more or less judged by it.”

Frantz Fanon, 1952

“In our imagination,

we were brown bodies

living like kings in white people’s houses…

We were ordering desserts we could not pronounce

in accents that were not ours.”

Koleka Putuma, 2017

One day during my undergraduate days, which was the first time I was in a place where the majority of people didn’t speak the same first language as me, I found myself repeating the word ‘pocket’ over and over, pronounced as /ˈpɒk.ɪt/ in the British variant of English and as /ˈpɑː.kɪt/ in the American variety. My aim through this endless phonetic repetition was to shape my mouth into curves and contortions that would enable me to correctly produce the first vowel sound in ‘pocket.’ Fanon writes about an évolué from Martinique who, because people expected him to swallow his ‘r,’ rolls his French ‘r’ rather exaggeratedly, a sound, one of my teachers would tell me, is best produced by imagining something lodged in your throat. The first vowel sound in pocket is the sound that was lodged inside me, one that I could not correctly articulate, producing with it, the problem of sounding my English out. The inheritances from my first language, Malayalam, made their presence felt when I pronounced words such as ‘pocket’ or ‘rocket.’ The word ‘pocket,’ when it gets rendered as പോക്കറ്റ് in Malayalam, not only transforms in terms of script, but also in terms of the vowel sound, which becomes a longer, more rounded one as opposed to the shorter one in English. As I repeated ‘pocket’ endlessly, I had hoped to scrub my voice off the inflections from Malayalam, to bury those cartographical trails in my voice which tied me to a very specific geography. My aim was to become a stateless person⎯at least in terms of what I sounded like. 

My efforts were met with a certain degree of success, though in hindsight I am unsure whether success is the right word to refer to what I had done to myself. By the end of my master’s degree in the same university, I had subdued the inflections from my first language to such an extent that people were surprised to discover my geographic affiliations when I chose to reveal them; my voice did not convey this information without my knowledge. Despite the attempts to scrub one set of vocal geographies from my voice, I would discover that there were always more. When my term as a teaching assistant in France was coming to an end, my colleague, who had also become my friend, told me that I sounded less ‘Indian’ when compared to how I spoke in the beginning. Are nations embodied by sounds? If so, what do nations sound like?

No matter the onerous efforts undertaken to transform my mouth and my vocal apparatus, I would never be considered a ‘native’ speaker of English, an adjective often prefixed as a mark of superiority in language learning. I begin thinking about the word ‘native’ when I see a post on a popular Facebook group for language exchanges. The principle of the group is to offer your skills in a language that you are good at in exchange for one you wish to learn. Someone made a post seeking a conversation partner so that they could perfect their English. A commenter with a South-Asian name had expressed interest, to which the original poster replied ‘native speakers only’⎯a reply that made me stop and investigate the source of discomfort that developed inside me as I voyeuristically consumed this virtual interaction between two strangers. The same person had reached out to me earlier in response to a post they had made seeking conversation partners who were interested in translation and literature. They sent me messages, but our conversation stalled. My name is not an obviously ‘Indian’ name; in fact, I have had people ask me whether this is my ‘real’ name and whether I had picked this name as a replacement for a more difficult ‘Indian’ name. The only photo associated with my profile is a black and white photo. Could it be that this person had assumed that I was a ‘native’ speaker of English in our first interaction?

The word ‘native’ is cartographical; it situates oneself in relation to the surrounding world. For instance, think of the usage ‘native’ species. The usage tells you that the organism in question has always existed in a specific geographic entity, and that it is not ‘exotic’; in other words, it is not an outsider. While thinking about the multiple facets of the word ‘native,’ I did what all academics do at some point: trace the etymological history of the word. The OED has two entries under the word ‘native,’ the first as a noun and the second as an adjective. I check the noun first and discover that a fair share of the entries is accompanied by a note which identifies the usage in question as either rare or obsolete or offensive. As a noun, ‘native’ designated multiple racialized groups in colonial histories, who were to be civilized by the white hand. Being ‘native’ was a condition that needed to be eradicated, suppressed and constrained. My next move was to look up the adjectival native, as it appears in ‘native speaker.’ In this case, native gestures to a cartography, a belonging to a geographical entity which somehow confers a superior status on a speaker of a language. In the OED, the adjectival ‘native’ has a subheading which reads ‘senses relating to condition of birth or origin.’ The two entries under this subheading are accompanied by the word ‘obsolete’ in italics. The adjectival native in ‘native speaker of English,’ as expressed by the poster on the Facebook group, alludes to conditions of birth and geography which are often coded as white. A word that relegated large groups of people to being inferior has somehow become a mark of excellence in language learning. 

As with the progression of events on internet, where a click or search takes a life of its own, littering your tabs with small windows that repeatedly remind you of the thing that you searched for, ‘native’ starts proliferating my browser tabs. My partner shows me an advertisement for a job in which the employer has added ‘native Canadian accent is a bonus.’ Facebook gives me an advertisement for ‘native’ deodorant, which came with a line about investing in oneself. In a rather predictable and feeble-minded move, I click on the ad, line the pockets of Facebook and the advertisers, and buy myself a deodorant stick. I am now the proud owner of a native deodorant stick; I can only hope that I act, smell and sound like a lavender and rose infused native. In colonial histories, smell was another factor that was weaponized against racialized populations⎯accusations of stinky bodies and stinky food. What did I invest in myself by purchasing this deodorant stick? I wonder if the people who were featured in an Aljazeera report on how UK immigrants were hiring accent coaches to sound more ‘English’ thought of it as an investment. Who is being invested in when the affluent international school circuit in India hires white language teachers and pays them more than what a local teacher gets paid?

The valorization of ‘native’ status in language learning relegates certain speakers of the language to a different class, albeit one that is inferior. Language capabilities of people from former colonies are often called into question. On the subreddit for the university where I am enrolled now, I spot a rant about how international students brought down the poster’s grade since these students, whom the poster had identified with a specific country, couldn’t write in university level English. Someone who had pointed out that the post was racist was being downvoted. Nestled amidst the multiple replies to the comment about racism, I found one line that has stayed with me. The commentor had highlighted how they were constantly asked to prove their linguistic abilities in English as though they hadn’t been colonized enough, with an added ‘lmao’ at the end. In addition to the colonial history, let’s also remember the institutional and bureaucratic machinery that thrives on language testing and its multiple avatars, most of which expire in a span of two years so that you are forced to pay a small fortune and retake the test once every two years. 

As a result of certain cartographic alliances, certain speakers of English are constantly asked to prove their legitimacy, irrespective of the years of post-secondary schooling or years of university studies pursued in English. My first visa application to join a PhD program in English was turned down; one of the reasons specified for the refusal was that my linguistic capabilities were not convincing. I thought I could safely assume that a letter from a university stating that I had been offered a place in an English PhD program was ample proof that I could survive in an English-speaking country. When I resubmitted my application, I included a score report from a standardized test for English. My visa was issued the second time, so whatever doubts that were there about my English-speaking abilities must have been dispelled by the score report. English, or rather proof of my English-speaking skills was required for me to secure passage from one cartographic zone into another. I learnt English as a second language through books; my parents bought me a cheap children’s magazine in English. I looked at the pictures first; then, I moved up to the speech bubbles in the comic panels, and finally read the serialized science fiction novel about Super Boy Ramu (I don’t remember the details, but there was a submarine involved). Learning English was an act of unlocking different cartographies, ones that were so removed from my immediate surroundings. Later on, I would also learn that certain phonological alliances and cartographies were more coveted than others.

My phonological alliances in Malayalam, my first language, ties me to a world of sounds that don’t exist in English. The upwards curl of the tongue against the palate to produce the retroflex sound ഴ in മഴ, reminding me of the torrential monsoons with their defeaning sound or the flattening of the tongue against the palate to produce the palatal nasal sound in മഞ്ഞ for yellow. Does the fact that my tongue learned to bend itself to produce these sounds first invalidate my knowledge of English and how I speak it? 

Instead of valuing the ‘nativeness’ of native speakers, why don’t we focus on how peoples across the world have made English their own, with many sounds, despite the circumstances under which the language was imparted to their ancestors? Novelist Ken Saro-Wiwa describes his novel Sozaboy as a novel written in ‘rotten’ English. What is termed as ‘rotten English’ is in fact a blend of pidgin English with a smattering of idiomatic English thrown in. Though this is a stylistic choice which bears no reflection to how people actually speak, the fact that Saro-Wiwa calls it rotten is noteworthy. The unique register that Saro-Wiwa develops is a mark of creativity and innovation, not rottenness. Similarly, countless speakers of English in India use particles, imparting their own sounds to English. Two Malayalam speakers speaking to each other might add അല്ലെ at the end of their sentences as a sound of affirmation. We add ‘no’ to the end of our sentences; we also misuse ‘only’ quite often, as in “I told you yesterday only, no?” (I am curious: what voice did you read that last sentence in? What does your voice embody?) Hindi speakers add ना, an obviousness marker or तो, which functions as a topic marker. These particles do not exist in English and their addition brings localised richness to English. I can only provide a limited inventory of how English changes with cartography with my limited experience. When such a profusion of English-es exist, why hold on ‘native speakers’ and their impeccable ‘native accents?’ What constitutes a ‘native’ accent and who gets to possess one? As long as we are intelligible, do accents matter? My linguist friend tells me that she never uses the term ‘native’; instead, she uses L1, L2... to designate first language, second language and so on, and thus avoiding falling back onto geography or conditions of birth, racially coded in the word ‘native.’

As I write this piece, I am deeply aware of what it means to come from a former colony where English is not only a language, but is also a tool for social and economic mobility. I am privileged to have received schooling and university education in English, to have had teachers who encouraged my interest in literature, and to have had access to universities and libraries. I do not wish to write about how English has unified us; rather, I want to emphasize that English is polarizing. In the Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, one of the aims that was identified for the introduction of English education in India was the creation of a new hybrid class: one that was “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” The minute might seem historically distant, but the hybridization that Macaulay wanted to bring about remains relevant. I think about the creature that I have become when I come across this passage from the novel Coconut by Kopano Matlwa.

“You will find…that the people you strive so hard to be like will one day reject you because as much as you may pretend, you are not one of their own…then you will turn back, but there too you will find no acceptance, for those you once rejected will no longer recognize the thing you have become. So far, too far to return. So much, too much you have changed. Stuck between two worlds, shunned by both.”

If the word ‘native’ reinscribes boundaries, the hybrids that Macaulay envisioned transcend those boundaries. Being hybrid also means that you are constantly outside the line, looking in; you will never become that which is enclosed inside the line. So, how do I pronounce the word ‘pocket?’ I do not know. Long after I had taken the trouble to repeat ‘pocket’ to myself over and over, long after I thought I had successfully buried the geographical inflections and the phonetic inheritances of my first language present in my voice, someone heard me speak in English and asked where I was from. I asked them to guess. They asked me to speak again and then correctly identified the cartographies that I had worked so hard to conceal. Perhaps they had a good ear. Or perhaps, somethings can’t really be hidden; they will seep through the tremors of an open mouth, during those moments when you see yourself without a mask.