Why Do English Speakers Eat Their Words?

One of the keys to being a foreign spy working as a double agent is to have an immaculate accent in the language you are pretending to be a native speaker of. You are supposed to be able to use slang expressions, produce idiomatic expressions at will, and possess a full knowledge of cultural, geographical and historical points that only native-born people would know. You are expected to be able to blend in to society like a sugar crystal in hot coffee. You should understand and be able to replicate the inside jokes and indulge in subtleties of nuance that will not arouse the suspicions of even the top military brass.

It is little wonder, then, that countries like the UK and Russia devote a large amount of money towards linguists, for the purposes of translation of course, but mainly for training as spies. This is where both governments then diversify: Russia spends a vast amount of money on converting the information it collects to use against its enemy, and the UK seeks to infiltrate deep into a government's innermost sanctum to gain as much knowledge of the enemy's moves without being noticed until it's too late.

And it is here that we find the spies with balls of tungsten - those that can get the knowledge they need, memorise it, or make replicas of it under the noses of the enemy, and disappear before anyone raises the alarm. Often, these are people who have another skill and can get hired as interns or service providers, such as IT specialists or security guards - in other words, people with access to many physical locations or who can handle sensitive material.

So the real secret to sniffing out a spy is to know the subtlest of signs when you are facing one, and how to call that person out before they get their hands on their target. For that purpose, there are people who are hired specifically to listen out for signs of non-native behaviour: this can be patterns of pronunciation in their speech, a particular way the person writes a specific letter of the alphabet, even how the person gesticulates.

For example, a Czech person is more likely to write a "t" similar to a "d". A Bulgarian will have difficulty pronouncing a full "L" so that it sounds more like a vowel. Spanish, Dutch and Finnish people often can't differentiate between "s" and "sh", "ch" and "dj", or "z" and "s". And one from WW2 was which fingers an operative used to order drinks - did they use their thumb for one or their forefinger for one? And did they use their thumb and forefinger for two, or forefinger and middle finger for two? These are just some of the very subtle differences top spies use to identify and catch double agents. There are plenty more, and some are unnoticeable to monolinguals, but to ninja linguists, they are bread and butter.

Do you remember the case of Robin Van Helsum, known as "Forest Boy" in Germany back in 2012? Some Dutch kid showed up in a forest saying he had no idea what he was doing or where he was from. The Wikipedia page on him says this: "[He] spoke English with a slight accent suggesting to the German Authorities that one or both of his parents were American or British. Police in Berlin believed that he may have been from the Czech Republic having given the indication that he lived in the undergrowth of the Ore Mountains." Well this goes to show that the German authorities really didn't hire any proper linguists, because if they did, I'm sure they would have identified his nationality, even down to the region he was from, in less than half a day. To not even know if he was American or British shows territorial behaviour and a real lack of wanting to involve real experts on the case.

To discover where someone is from in a case like that, one needs to ask the most pertinent questions, and listen to the way he pronounces certain words. I give language training to multinational classes of professionals, and one of the things I enjoy most is, on the first day of a course, guessing the person's name (and therefore his/her nationality) from the entries on the presence list without them telling me directly who they are, just by asking questions like "what's your job?" and "what did you do at the weekend?" Because that's our métier.

So that brings me on to how to catch an English-speaking double agent: and that is the schwa, represented in the IPA by the symbol /ə/. The schwa is a sound made by English speakers that falls in unstressed syllables, for example the "u" in "support", or the "a" in "England". It is a nondescript sound that can appear in many different letter combinations and is really just a filler for the space vacated by the original sound. It is Schrödinger's phoneme - a sound that is both there and not there at the same time. If it were a person, it would be the one who at parties sits in the corner reading a book, sips tap water and never makes eye contact with anyone.

It is always unstressed and never has any set letter combination to identify it. The schwa is so elusive, it sometimes really isn't there even when you think it is. Let me elaborate: how many syllables in the word "separate"? Well, as a verb, three /sɛpərɛɪt/, but as an adjective some pronounce three, some two, so either /sɛprət/ or /sɛpərət/.

For that reason, English speakers are sometimes picked up by foreign spycatchers when attempting to speak their language by the way they pronounce unstressed vowel sounds in the target language. This is not the heaviest feature of English speakers, but it is one that a British double agent might forget when trying to speak another language, and either overcompensate the weak sound or add a schwa where none is found.

The vast majority of European languages pronounce sounds as they are written, and even if they don't, like French, Portuguese or Greek, there are rules as to the letter combination. Two languages even have a dedicated letter of the alphabet to make this schwa sound - Romanian and Bulgarian. English is not like this, and this phoneme, the most prevalent vowel sound in English, can be found in many different places. Below are some words that contain the schwa but with wildly different letter usages. See if you can identify the parts of the words where the schwa is found (sometimes there are more than one):

information
combine
provide
Nottingham
Gorilla
forgive
apology
molecular
anxious
Oxford
doctor
glamorous
photography
Edinburgh
mathematician
maternal
allowance
Portsmouth
harbour
dermatology
comfortable
Scotland

The rise of the schwa was an important step in uniting different dialects to be mutually intelligible. Different people in various parts of the country pronounced words and place names differently, but the one thing they had in common was the way the consonants were pronounced. So in order to be more intelligible to each other, they dropped their local way of pronouncing words. Slowly, those sounds disappeared, but the spelling lived on.

Other things have contributed to the slow process of English standardisation and elimination of dialectal differences, such as the arrival of television, but one constant remains - if you want to speak good English without an accent, especially if you want to be a double agent, you firstly need to perfect the schwa and recognise where to (not) use it!