BROKEN ENGLISH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 5

BROKEN ENGLISH

Sir--Among our radio script-writers @ curious convention is maintained, by which all foreigners, even those who are comparatively literate, are compelled to speak broken English. The aim-as in the case of the naked cannibal who puts on the striped cricket belt he has borrowed from the missionary-may be simply to create a "colourful effect." Or it may have the deeper, perhaps unconscious, motive of ministering to our pride of race by making other nationals appear to be very much more cretinous than in fact they are. In certain kinds of radio drama this practice is so much in keeping with the general character of the production, and helps towards such a notable consistency of effect, that one cannot possibly take exception to it: one simply turns to another station. There are occasions, howéver, when one is moved to expostulate. The Russians, as no reader of the daily press needs to be told, present a combination of barbarism and degeneracy that is unique in history, They are capable of anything. I thought, however, that in a recent broadcast production of O. A. Gillespie’s "The Amazing Harold Williams" the author (or possibly it was the producer) was rather over- doing things when he made several Russian characters (including Count Tolstoy, author of half a dozen novels that have been very well reviewed) speak English as if they had been brought up in the back streets of Port Said, or on the beach at Papeete. It might be argued that, although the convention may lead to a slight distortion of values when it makes a Frenchman talk to a Frenchman, or a Dane to a Dane, as if both were half-witted, in this production Russians were speaking to an Eng-lish-speaking visitor, and so might have been using English and doing it imperfectly. But the narrator brought home to us with considerable force the fact that the subject of this documentary was a linguistic genius who was able to speak 57 languages. (Or am I thinking of Heinz? Fifty-something, at all events.) Since Harold Williams had made a special study of Russian, it is inconceivable that any Russian could have been put to the inconvenience of using semi-pidgin English in talking to him, of all people. ; Speaking generally of the effects of this convention I would say that, long as the French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian characters presented to us in radio drama are made so much more inarticulate in English than they are in their own tongues, listeners will be greatly encouraged in the notion that literacy, like moral probity and the capacity to enjoy the game of cricket, is a peculiarly English accomplishment. This view is, I think, already held with sufficient conviction amongst us not to need any emphasis in radio programmes; and mere courtesy should restrain us from reminding foreigners so often, and in so public a fashion, of their limitations.

A. R. D.

FAIRBURN

(Auckland)