When in Japan... speak like the Japanese

Nagoya subway station — shibuya246

In our first week, my fellow trainees and I commented that our trainers seemed to be alike: three or four of them were white North American males, with the same complexions, lifestyles (read: they all have Japanese wives), and mannerisms. Not least of these mannerisms was a tendency to use a very peculiar intonation pattern in their speech. It was partly this speech habit that made us believe they were nearly "the same person" — and in fact, these trainers are friends and do spend time with each other often.

Consider this sentence: "Is everything ok?"

Most native (American) English speakers will start at one pitch* to begin the question, then dip down on the "o" before drastically raising their pitch on the "kay?" portion. However, our trainers make a sort of ~ shape with their intonation, where the "kay" portion involves a slight rise in pitch before dropping drastically and then rising again to a point not nearly as high as the American English final pitch. It's definitely not a native intonation pattern, and I can only assume it comes from their experience with Japanese intonation. You can hear this in the short rapid-fire clip below (the fifth "nani" gives the intonation I'm explaining! But not the final one...haha!):



Most of our trainers have been living here for over five years, and have a significant other who speaks Japanese natively. As a linguist, I was excited to realize that the trainers' speech habit comes from the same phenomenon I wrote my linguistics thesis about!

Language police! — sillypucci

It's called accommodation. In a nutshell, all speakers around the world tend to adjust our speech depending on our present company. I used to be very insecure about this, and in high school I thought I was being fake by changing my mannerisms based on my changing audiences. But it's not fake at all, as I found through my later research. In fact, most of us do this very naturally for a very samaritan — albeit subconscious! — purpose: to help everyone in the conversation find a common ground and feel at ease.

This sort of subconscious accommodation is the reason we do many strange language things: it's part of why we sometimes oversimplify our language when speaking with non-native speakers, and it's related to why friends with different dialects tend to settle on one dialect within that group of friends.

In short, our trainers have assimilated this intonational feature of Japanese intonation and have probably used it so much in accommodating the language of Japanese students/friends/SOs that it has carried over into their own native English. I have already found myself accommodating my students with some Japanese mannerisms in the same way. Here's hoping that means fluency is around the corner! ;)

* For more on pitch, stress and more, check out Pronuncian.