The Myth of the Native Speaker

A speech therapist on language, music, and freedom of pronunciation in a globalized world

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Though I appear as a music nerd on Medium, my actual occupation is speech therapy, which frequently and conveniently overlaps with music and culture through the human voice and language.

As a recently converted baby-ARMY, I find it abhorrent how BTS, seven grown men and pop sensations, have their speech patterns picked apart. Their language choices are made into public debate, and every error turns into a Reel the next morning.

Since I chose to live abroad in Taiwan AFTER working as a therapist, I admittedly have heavy ethical concerns with accent reduction, despite it being one of the things my own profession is known to “help with”.

Part of the reason I turned away from speech and went to study abroad was that accent modifications enforce nativist norms that I truly believe should be a thing of the past in our current globalised world.

Join me for a deep dive into pronunciation, language norming, and freedom of choice that will help you find the right words to avoid being a lingo-racist in the future.

Your ears are fine, your brain is just dumb

As a speech therapist, one of my favorite quotes is:

“We don’t hear with our ears, we hear with our brain.”

I love it because it always confuses people initially and gives me the chance to explain that ears are merely an organic funnel for soundwaves, which get transported via a string of nerves to your brain. It is the auditory cortex and its highway network to other brain areas like Broca’s and Wernicke’s area (though that is already an old and simplified depiction) that “hears” in terms of decoding.

So, if you hear a foreigner speak English and cannot understand at all, I would like you to stop directing the issue to your ears. Instead, you should know that it is your brain that has the problem. It needs training. Not your ear, and especially not the other person’s mouth.

I hate to break it to you, but having to train your brain to understand accents is the price you pay for being born with a globally enforced lingua franca. I would argue it is a deal that is still very much in your favor.

As a speech therapist, much of my work consisted of listening to people who were unintelligible to others. As an expat amongst zero native speakers, this quest continued. Now I can both understand most of what a person with pronunciation difficulties tries to convey, and I am the translator for most South and East Asian accents of English.

You see, learning to understand those who are deemed “unintelligible” is actually a process of training one’s brain to detect the abnormalities in a pronunciation pattern and replace them with the most likely correct word. This is why the longer you engage with a person with pronunciation differences, the better you get at understanding.

The thing that definitely will not help is what is currently being done to BTS on the world stage: Asking why they STILL don’t have better English and having a good laugh at every misunderstanding. These jokes are not how you gloss over uncomfortable situations; that is how you cement cultural differences.

The “normalised” minority that holds power

I often call myself a “retired speech therapist”, almost like a vegan among my kind. I know many of my colleagues today treat children for something I personally view as an unethical debate, which I choose to opt out of: Accent reduction.

And I know what you might say now: “But these kids would get bullied if the therapist didn’t help. They need help to fit in; they need the therapist to learn how to speak properly.”

To that I say: What do you mean by “speak properly”? Speaking “normally”?

The reason children get bullied for a lisp is not the child’s problem or a serious medical concern, but rather a nasty societal disconnect that led to people with certain pronunciations not being taken seriously.

Though we all know: Just because you pronounce a “s” sound between your teeth, leading to a lisp, you are not actually mentally impaired. It is just a speech pattern that diverts from the norm, which our society deems distasteful.

Interestingly, what is “proper speech” is also determined by the white norm. It used to be Queen’s English; now, worldwide, most favor US accents. The hilarious thing is that the “norm” is actually a minority, because across statistics, only around 25% of English speakers are native speakers. The story of “The Weirdest People in the World” seems to repeat itself here.

This phenomenon has many names: Linguistic discrimination regarding those who speak an “improper” dialect, or language-based bias if we, for instance, think of employment, or accent bias if we analyze a “foreigner’s” attempts at speaking “proper English.”. And then there is my favorite hate-word: Nativism.

Nativism enforces the idea that native speakers are in some way ahead of non-native speakers, particularly mentally, simply because they “speak better”. There is also the added layer of cultural priming that often leads to differences in language pragmatics, where stereotypically Asians would speak up less while Americans are highly vocal, leading to a bigger share of the public discourse and attention.

This nativism is a beast in my eyes, that chews away at linguistic pluralism and diversity acceptance.

I filled an entire book (soon to be released!) with all that I have painfully come to learn about nativism as I live as a white girl in Asia, who looks like a native speaker but isn’t actually. I get to see where my face opens doors, where my US accent is well perceived, and where eyebrows furrow when I mention that I am “not a native speaker”.

This process is called “linguistic gate-keeping”.

BTS has been singing in Korean all along, but they also have a lot of Japanese songs and even some Chinese songs. In fact, the K-pop wave has been around in Asia since the late 1990s, so its primary market was never “English”. Now English opens some doors for them, but this is not the second language they sing in; in fact, it’s their fourth.

So if you complain about their “inability to learn languages”, after their 4-year military break, sincerely: Shut up.

There is no language without culture

The second voice I frequently hear is mega-ARMY members, who have been following BTS for years and argue the exact opposite: BTS should stop singing in English; they were already famous when singing exclusively in Korean.

And gosh, how I wish this were true.

The problem here is that if you are inside the K-pop bubble, you likely don’t realize how many people around you wouldn’t know K-pop at all, because you are the one spreading the word. That is anchoring bias in your own surroundings, a subjective idea, not an objective truth.

What I unfortunately see more than anything in these fans is a certain extent of fandom exclusivity through Korean, or a misplaced pioneer spirit that gets taken away when their fandom expands into English territory.

And that is the problem with English K-pop: It enters the mainstream, and by doing so, the previous “outsiders” who love K-pop are suddenly just normal. This feels unfair because they were discriminated for so long and now they don’t even get to celebrate their discovery spirit and defense of the genre.

[embed]“Body to Body” by BTS via YouTube

Arguably, the question might become: Is it even K-pop if it is sung in English? This is a question BTS has answered amazingly in their new album ARIRANG by confirming that there are two levers they can pull to make K-Pop “Korean”: Language & culture.

The first song *Body to Body samples a traditional Korean choir singing the traditional folk melody Arirang*, which most Koreans grew up with. In just a few months, we will surely hear this second hymn of Korea sung in Korean by fans all across the world, never mind their first language.

I love this idea because it flips the script: Suddenly, it is not the BTS members who are discriminated for singing in English, but rather the entirety of the fans learn to sing Korean with them. And not just any lyrics, but an actual cultural and historic artefact. It translates culture through language in a way that is unique.

Korean sounds misinterpreted in English brains

Finally, it is time to get technical in terms of pronunciation, so I can show that what you perceive as just “an accent” is far more complex than you would think. Actually, some of their “accents” are quite literally necessary.

Korean syllables, as is evident from how Hangeul is written, are very strictly separated and feature a variety of consonants defined by aspiration level, not vocalisation (d/t, k/g). In contrast, they have more variations of “s”-style frikatives at the front of the mouth.

The result of these differences are the infamous hissing sounds that Koreans like to make in between sentences to express opinions without words. Even the cat-like “ch” sound is such a fricative, though in the back of the mouth. In chat-windows, it is often transcribed as “kkkk”.

Pronunciation problem or freedom of choice?

V is the victim of many English-related jokes, especially since the recent Jimmy Fallon interview. In it, the band was asked to state what they missed most about the person next to them. And with complete pride and assurance, V announced that: “I missed KISSING Jung-Kook.”

Of course, this led to thousands of Reels and a few good laughs about “these cute Korean boys with language issues”. Quickly, RM clarified that V intended to say “teasing” instead of “kissing,” and it seemed that he had actually understood V correctly, but at the same time heard that the crowd misinterpreted this word.

This is another case of the above-mentioned phenomenon: RM, who is likely frequently exposed to how V pronounces English words, has trained his brain in understanding V, despite the “ab-normal” pronunciation patterns.

What V does, when he confuses “teasing” for “kissing,” is actually a typical process of latalisation. This is a pronunciation abnormality that kids speaking their first or second language in Austria receive therapy for if it occurs frequently. But does that mean V needs therapy?

No, he has the freedom of choice to do what he wants.

Furthermore, if you watch V’s mouth, you can see that his jaw moves very little in English, which is something I have seen among many Korean men that I have spoken to, and a matter a vocal teacher might address. This actually benefits his singing, which is something he shares with the worldwide handsome: Jin.

[embed]Second performance video of “Swim” by BTS via YouTube

How the voice impacts speech

Both V and Jin have a very breathy, airy voice, giving them further allure and a sound as if they whispered in your ear. Another famous example of a breathy voice is Billie Eilish, who is also known to whisper and only roughly approximate her lyrics. But of course, no one would have accent bias for her; she is American after all.

To achieve this breathy sound, more air needs to pass the vocal folds. This air eventually needs to go out of the mouth or nose, and because the mouth is already open, that is where the air escapes first.

If you listen to the second version of the Swim video (the slightly funky swimming-pool version), you can actually hear that air that I am talking about, as it hits the microphone. If you pick out Jin’s parts, you will perceive a rustling in the microphone whenever he starts a sentence. It is audible in a slight crackle, as if the mic is exposed to wind.

Comparatively, this sound appears frequently when Jin and V sing, but it is almost absent when Jimin or RM sing. The lovely, whispery, and almost erotic voices of Jin and V also require them to use more air, keep their mouths open more often, and all of this air leads to a much flatter articulation.

The King of compensation: Suga

Now, for the most interesting one among the members. Suga inspired this entire article with his vocal performance in Swim (swimming-pool version). As I watched it, I seriously asked myself the question: Was he inserted using AI? Why does his mouth pattern not match the sound he produces?

Suga is not discussed as a member with “improper” English, because he sometimes straight out refuses to speak, telling ARMY who ask him to speak English: “No, I speak Korean.”

In SWIM, it is evident that he is quite good at opening his mouth to articulate, and he thus achieves more accurate pronunciation through jaw movements, but his tongue mostly stays glued to the bottom of his mouth. This should theoretically cause big pronunciation issues that are audible, but he is the KING of compensation, and thus the roof of his tongue must be very active to compensate for the lack of movement in the front.

The only sounds that make this odd tongue placement audible are “s” sounds that are spread throughout. He sounds almost like he would have a minor lisp. And yet, I am sure that if he wanted to change that, he absolutely could. If you have ever heard him rap as August D, you would know that this man is very well able to pronounce things speedily and correctly, if he so pleases.

Suga truly fascinates me. He shows how one can cleverly produce the same word with an entirely different mechanism. So much for “correct pronunciations” if you can’t hear them.

On top of that, I love him for being one of the few members who never apologizes for not speaking English and doesn’t take shit for it. Instead, he chooses to use it whenever he pleases and however he pleases, and that is his good right.

And with all of these detailed examples of how and why BTS pronounces things the way they do, one thing should have become clear: It was never their mouths that were struggling with English, but it is your brain that struggles to understand their English.

BTS’s accents are valid, and their global success doesn’t depend on erasing their linguistic pride, and it doesn’t matter if you think they should sing more Korean or less English.

The beauty of this band is its cultural roots, the way in which many members hold firmly and unapologetically onto it, and most importantly, to me, they stand at the turning point into another era of globalisation.

We have hit the time where globalisation and diversity are not merely shadows on the wall, but reflections in the mirror we cannot keep turning away from.

Until now, it was enough to be fascinated with “the idea of” diversity and “hold space” for others. Now it is time to MAKE that space, learn, and change. This process doesn’t come without sacrifice for those in previously powerful positions, but it is the bottleneck for a more diverse and accepting future.

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