Speak from the heart
A tour through some uncomfortable moments in class
You can understand another culture through its memes.
The phrase “I want to speak from my heart,” whose origin is an infamous speech by Russian official Vitali Mutko, is one such viral phenomenon.
Russian learners of English all know this phrase and take great pleasure in saying it in the most exaggerated accent possible. While I suppose it’s intended to form instant rapport with foreigners, especially native English-speakers, it leaves me cold.
Sure, Mutko’s diction is a little over the top and cliché, but overall, it’s intelligible and achieves its purpose.
So: what, exactly, is wrong with this man’s English?
Some anecdata might point to an answer.
A couple of years ago during a speaking club, one student went a bit off-topic and began to complain about how bad ideas from the West tend to eventually arrive in Russia. I smiled, thinking she was referring to crony-capitalism, income inequality, consumerism, etc. I was unpleasantly surprised when she instead began railing against the “cancelling” of a transphobic billionaire author and the cultural ascendance of heretofore marginalized minorities.
Oh.
Similarly, in another class, I played some excerpts from a BBC Why Factor episode. After one clip from a London barbershop (I think), I observed a student snickering and saying something like “I don’t know what he said. I just know he’s a Black guy!” I asked him to repeat himself for the class and pointed out that the speaker in question spoke fluent English while he, the student, didn’t. Therefore, he ought to show some respect: if he listened, he could learn something.
In yet another class, an audio file featuring a speaker with a fairly heavy Eastern European accent provoked laughter and mockery from a Russian student. She was amused at the broadness of the speaker’s O’s and rolling R’s. She even mimicked how this actor sounded; this student herself didn’t have such an accent at all.
What’s going on here?
About those bad ideas…
According to recent surveys in England, nearly 50% of university students and working adults have suffered from mockery or criticism of their accents. There are toxic personalities online that perpetuate this idiocy, dismissing non-Received Pronunciation accents as signs of a poor education or lack of intellect (I offer due respect here.)
This kind of “linguistic racism” seems to be a way that some Russian students, “outsiders,” want to fit into use of the lingua franca: by adopting the worst tendencies of its dominant cultures. They want to be among those who believe they are white.
It’s bizarre to witness, having grown up with immigrants from the Soviet Union who took great pride in being “Russian” in America and who often embraced Black American culture while scoffing at middle-American bourgeois aesthetics.
Then again, that was before Britain’s main transphobic bitch cast her spell of eternal immaturity, leaving her perpetually puerile readership dreaming of proper sorting into the class of the properly-accented elect.
Despite non-native English speakers being, by far, the majority of English users on Earth, there is little interest in this plurality in the classroom. I’m careful to point out differences in regional and transatlantic Englishes when I think they are relevant or interesting, but I can do little to combat the eye-rolling that greets any mention of innovations in Nigerian, Indian, or Chinese English.
This is an intellectual and moral tragedy.
What history (and, if you must, genetics) shows is that racialized differences are purely social phenomena used to oppress. In an age where more people than ever before are able to communicate with one another, and the potential for revolutionary creativity and invention is greater than ever, race as a construct ought to be one of the first errors to dispense with.
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.
Indeed, this concept is at the heart of white American identity: one more bad idea that’s made its way to Russia.
