“I don’t score any, eh?”: What happened to Marcus Rashford’s English?

Recently, a post-match interview of Marcus Rashford made its rounds around the internet as fans were amused at his ‘Spanish-ified’ English. Speaking to a Spanish-speaking interviewer, he adopted grammatical and lexical features typical of native Spanish speakers speaking English in the choice to adopt the present tense to describe a situation in the past, the choice of the preposition ‘in’ to reference the training session — “Dani and Pedri they are telling me ‘shoot, shoot’” “I hype myself up a little bit” “So then I try” “Yesterday in the training, I don’t score any” — and the usage of the discourse particle “eh?” at the end of a sentence. While most fans simply got a good laugh out of it, some suggested that he was doing this in order to be better understood by a Spanish-speaking audience.

Watch the interview here (4:33:45 onwards)

While this is a possible explanation, I propose a different explanation. Rashford wasn’t worried he wouldn’t be understood. Instead, he was converging. This occurs when individuals adapt their communication to become more similar to their interlocutor (i.e., their audience) in order to reduce social distance, increase efficiency, or gain approval. This concept, introduced by social psychologist Howard Giles in the 1970s, was part of a larger theory that we today know as the Communication Accommodation Theory. Within this theory, one can either choose to converge or diverge from their interlocutor, depending on their goal. In the case of Rashford, it was evident that he was trying to build rapport with his Spanish-speaking interviewer, and perhaps the fans watching, in a gleeful post-match moment after having scored a clinical, crucial free kick goal for his team to win them the league title.

Another observation to back up this claim is the fact that Rashford, despite adopting elements of Spanish speakers’ English, retained a recognisably English accent (referring to the pronunciation and prosody of his speech — intonation, rhythm, and stress). He was not trying to hypercorrect (i.e., linguistically overcompensate). Think about it, when the typical English-speaking tourist goes on holiday to his favourite beach vacation destination, how do you picture them speaking to the wait staff? Perhaps they would order in English, but with altered pronunciation, intonation and word stress, in an attempt to emulate the local accent. Oftentimes, this neither impresses nor facilitates understanding. But a few-day-long trip is not enough to pick up the grammatical features of a non-native English variety, much less the discourse particles typically used by locals in specific contexts, and even less so to begin using them in spontaneous speech situations. And so I would say that Rashford’s speech reflects his substantial immersion in a local environment, though not to the point that his accent has changed. Not yet, at least.

To me, this short interview is proof that Rashford is settling in well in Barcelona, not just in his familiarity with the local language norms, but in his effort, whether active or subconscious, to linguistically converge towards his interlocutors. As a Barça fan, this simply warms my heart, and I think I speak for many Culers when I say I hope he stays at Barça beyond this season.

Now, the big questions are, will he start doing interviews in Spanish, like teammates Robert Lewandowski and Frenkie De Jong have been doing? Will he be learning Catalan? To date, he already has an Instagram post half-captioned in Catalan (with accurate accent mark placements)!

Post-league title win and parade (Taken from Instagram)

And what English fans would probably be most interested to see… How will Rashford’s English continue to change? Only time will tell.