A fine line between exploring accents and working with spontaneous speech—less simplification, more historicization.
A glimpse into the chameleonic nature of films and how it helps us imbibe words, sonic textures, and linguistic nuances.
Introduction
Phonology; Film; Stream of Speech; Blur gap; Accent; Pronunciation; historicisation; Architecture; Transparency; Blur; Sound substance; Decodification; Spontaneous and messy Speech;
Before we dive into its intricacies, I feel compelled to add one side note: on no account should the following reflections undermine our excitement and boldness when approaching these unresolved language issues. What’s at stake here is the much-needed pause to critically reflect on a persistent and chameleonic problem that is integral to our challenges as language teachers and researchers. Each language expert may have their own preferred tools for wisely and effectively approaching accents, sounds, and decoding in their lessons.
What I am offering here, however, is a space for reflection, where we can examine the problem, digest the insights, and assess whether it offers realistically tangible benefits or rather has a disorienting effect on learners when they are confronted with the messy, blurry sounds spoken in a diverse and unpredictable reality. By no means do I intend to suggest that I am providing teachers with fresh, groundbreaking solutions. On the contrary, this might generate brand new questions—and I am an ardent believer that questions prompt us to take a plunge into experimentation, aligned with theoretical assumptions grounded in research, observation, and description.
Films, sounds and Stream of speech.
Had I not had a dalliance with film, however fleeting, it would have taken me much longer to unlock the floodgates to the sea of possibilities within a two-hour cinematic experience. Film is, quintessentially, a potent artistic expression, and there is a kernel of truth to the idea that images, like written words, generate their own stream of sounds. As language enthusiasts, our role is to devote time to imbibing their words, sonic textures, and nuances.
Before delving into the nitty-gritty of my cartography, a caveat: nor am I the most skilled cinephile, nor am I particularly well-versed in film theory, nor do I intend to craft a well-argued thesis on language and its long-standing assumptions in cinematic discourse. However, without meaning to sound self-important or self-congratulatory, I do have a knack for attuning myself to the underlying soundscapes of language—those imbued with the raw spontaneity of unfiltered, organic speech.
Though I consider myself clear-headed enough to distinguish a top-tier film production from a lackluster attempt, my choices are dictated less by technical merit than by the serendipitous nature of sentiment—that pinballing effect of emotions, akin to the lingering aftershocks of a riveting, unsettling book that refuses to leave one's mind. To put it bluntly, there is a film that has been playing on a loop in my head, and I can't shake it off: Boiling Point.
For me, the film is driven by a desire to juxtapose the harrowing and the heartwarming, keeping spectators from idly coasting through or dismissing it as a mere faff. It stars Stephen Graham - whom I consider one of the greatest British actors of our time - portraying a chef besieged by a relentless spate of crises in a high-pressure London kitchen.
The film’s watershed moment comes when a food inspector’s audit results in the restaurant’s downgrade due to hygiene violations. The suffocating tension is fertile ground for wrangling, conflict, and miscommunication, as the entire staff operates under crushing pressure with no room to diffuse tensions or regain composure. Tellingly, these fractious relationships further erode staff morale, chipping away at their team spirit and ultimately sacrificing any sense of collective purpose in favor of entrenched hierarchical structures.
Yet, despite the film’s chaotic, nerve-fraying energy, at no point does it leave viewers despondent or disoriented.
While these turbulent dynamics may strike a chord with certain audiences, what truly piqued my interest—by a long chalk—was the way language compels people to circumvent reality when they fail to confront it directly. One scene, in particular, is steeped in subtext, exposing the deep-seated, systemic racism still embedded in institutions. At the heart of this is a Black waitress, forced to navigate hostility and prejudice in ways her white colleagues never have to contend with. In this cacophony of tensions, the newly arrived chef, Camille—a Frenchwoman—struggles to decipher the myriad regional British accents that surround her. This character was played by Izuka Hoyle, a Scottish actress, born and bred in Edinburgh. Check out her interview here.
It is patently untrue that the deluge of images saturating our screens serves only as a distraction, preventing spectators from fully savoring what a cinematic narrative has to offer. On the contrary, I’ve found myself waxing lyrical about the very real benefits of immersing oneself in whatever one stumbles upon in English language, either a film or a tv series. However, it is clear-cut that compelling and well-crafted films do not equate to clear communication patterns and intelligible dialogues.
Representational plenitude of sounds and images, may be tenably claimed as good fit in a film, though this is not what is in question in Boiling point. The paramount exemplar of this contraction is the parlous state of the relationship between intelligibility and aesthetic that precipitates a sensation of misunderstanding , or even a lack of the bare essential skills to decipher sounds.
The symbolic operation that structures this whirlwind of terribly convoluted dialogues dwelling in miscommunication is represented, at its finest, through Camile, the french chef whose language skills are deemed insufficient to strike up the intricate transaction between linguistic elements in the realm of communicative operations.
It leads me back to a text I published a while ago on my Substack—should you be keen on exploring it in depth, here is the link—where I dissected the stream of speech with variations in clarity, drawing a close-knit connection between Richard Cauldwell’s Phonology for Listening and other subtle, elusive cultural undercurrents that are supposedly integral to our linguistic edifice.
In communicative settings, those who bear the brunt of misunderstanding are often those ill-equipped to navigate the sea of soundscapes that language is composed of. The capaciousness of organic spoken language decoding merges with the hustle and bustle of an unsettling and turbulent auditory environment. In this vein, speakers must rely on a battery of sounds that dissolve into one another, sometimes vanishing entirely depending on the speaker.
This interplay of sounds may elude basic linguistic proficiency, as the heart of this process lies in a variety of factors, including speed, phonetic shifts shaped by social and cultural influences, clarity variations, and accents. Check out here
Listening, per ser, may not be enough to wade through the barrage of sounds imbued with such a groundbreaking, sound-diverse film like Boiling point, as though we were staring down the barrel of a liturgical ritual of sounds and words that, tellingly, is rash to fathom out. Knowing all the setbacks that can be confronted along the way, tackling messy and organic spoken English is akin to taking a leap of faith and sticking to our tempting venturesome spirit in order to be up to the task of exploring its sounds, textures and forms.
It undertakes the work of articulating connections and blurry horizons of sounds, by examining sounds through a suprasegmental phonology study, which comprise the way speakers express their speech into rhythmic bursts of between a quarter of a second and three seconds in length. Unlike the citation form of a word, one that is concerned with pronunciation in dictionaries, listening, in its most general sense, should be perceived and worked out as a process of understanding the sound shapes of the streams of speech, and not the entire language system materialised into sounds.
While I was perusing the first pages of this book, I was concurrently giving some thought to the sounds I encountered through the film, and I ended up ruminating on one particular aspect spotlighted by Cauldwell: Both L1 and L2 speakers are not aware of the variety of sound shapes that spoken words have. Speakers are harshly thrown into an amalgamation of sounds that do not own clearly defined and intelligible beginnings and endings. Their edges are blurred, syllables are dropped and either vowels and consonants simply disappear whilst interactions take place. One vivid index of this fluid speed is the fact that we do not hear the acoustic blur of sound substance that reaches our ears.
His ideas transported me back to a discussion I had years ago with some scholars in the realm of architecture. Language, per se, is inextricably tied to architectural concepts—and architecture is, to some extent, imbued with linguistic resources. In this line of thinking, I would like to use it as a metaphorical arc, as we can consider transparency, translucency, reflectance, and refraction as properties that make glass- like language - a chameleon-like substance that transforms with changes in perspective. A glass monument symbolizing blurred edges that shortens the distance between visual communication from the inside and human interaction from the outside, akin to the contentious, tense relationship between sound substance and human communication.
In the realm of linguistics and Phonology, according to Richard Cauldwell, this phenomenon called “acoustic blur" transforms automatized and robotically rehearsed conversations into an extremely rapid, automatic, internal decoding process in which expert skill operates subliminal, below the level of awareness and attention. The polarities of imaginary sounds ingrained in our horizon of expectations, like the smooth and the shattered, should be shifted to the emphasis on the spontaneous and instantaneous fluid exchange of sounds as a product of social relations.
In reality, being thrown into this island of untrustworthy sound entities without means of discernment, results in a state of entropy where the listener acts imperiously while attempting to decode sounds but fails to move strategically toward the sound substances. Fundamentally, this unremittingly failing engagement with sound substance of speech at a suprasegmental level may cause them a pang of frustration and discouragement, hindering their progress in the learning process.
From a theoretical standpoint, Cauldwell states that this is partially due to the fact that students are chronically used to listening to sounds at a segmental level; thus, when confronted with the diminution of phonetic information at a segmental level - embedded in everyday speech - they wrestle with recognising the inapparent yet chameleonic nature of sounds at a suprasegmental level. The supposedly lack of awareness by teachers while assisting learners, for example, may lead to a mismatch in the classroom context, which generally results in teachers falling short of investigating what learners actually perceive while decoding the sound substance of a spontaneous and messy conversation intrinsically linked to the blurred sounds swamped with accents, emotions and external variants.
The impossibility of warranting its translation and decodification may prompt teachers to deflect their focus away from spontaneous speech and sounds in a suprasegmental way - it is highly unlikely that teachers may feel insecure or even threatened by the degree of unpredictability and inaccuracy while managing their learners approach to sounds.
To top it off, the substance of speech is naturally invisible, and regardless of how much we strive to translate it into graphic substance—writing—it will continuously evolve and become something else. Analogizing this constant state of fluid flux and its ceaselessly mutating core to the stream of speech may evoke a pang of emotion, even igniting the worry that the real meaning embedded in the production of sounds may not be fully grasped by speakers—chances are, it will not be. Caudwell warns that this sound substance of speech is far more difficult to describe for the purposes of teaching and learning a language, as spontaneous models cannot be taught by rule, nor can they be easily or entirely identified by an expert in any given communicative interaction.
None of these sound features are under our control, and this is, contradictorily, the unavoidable source of despair and the gloomy atmosphere that cannot be left by the wayside. Although it may ruffle a few feathers due to the necessity of the denaturalization of a monolithic and unerring predictability of language, it begets, in both listening and speaking, the deflection of homogeneous, predictably standardized sounds, engineering a deformatted, fluid stream of sound circulation that wades through the seemingly, ostensibly heterogeneous unicity, which, in reality, is an unstable temporality undergoing an unremitting metamorphosis of sounds and their acoustic materiality.
On account of this deformation of sounds—and its disorienting effect on us—there is no such thing as a synchronized sound device by which we could, in essence, live and experience the same temporal sound decoding at the same time. Accent, and its circulatory apparatus, serves as a rude awakening to the fact that sounds are, by nature, a knotty problem that shakes sound principles and their foundation. The most striking thing about it is the intricate relationship embedded in soundscapes, which seem to spark through the textures and infinitely varied voice inflections.
This process hinders us from labeling and reducing one accent to a unified, strictly arranged categorization of subjectivity. On closer inspection, the blur gap undeniably has a disorienting effect on the one trying to decipher what is being addressed in a given language, spoken with a broad accent. Indiscriminately, the close-knit relationship between blurred sounds and accents touches on the edge of sound expectations and what is within the realms of possibility for decoding.
This line holds a kernel of truth in the idea that we, as speakers and human beings, are constantly changing and retracing our steps in the course of our lives, allowing ourselves to experience difficult lifestyles, cultures, class affiliations, and social diversity. Contemporary frameworks of sound have actually sprouted from the ruins of ancient and archaic societies that have not done away with their traditions and social mores.
Owing to the extensive variety of sounds evolving over the years, the dissolution of borders, and the sudden advent of a global pandemic—I am not even considering globalization, as it is a commonplace idea—the sound substance and the social human dynamic were on the same wavelength in the hotchpotch of cultures crossing paths and merging over the past four years.
It is no wonder that this array of ideas conjured up—at the cost of being misinterpreted by entrenched and conservative views on language—is fundamentally grounded in reliable and prestigious literature in our field.
An important caveat: the heart of this text, as well as its counterparts, is rooted in an insightful and provocative line on language and the internet that I stumbled upon in a David Crystal's book. While contemplating the shrewdly and deeply informative Language and the Internet, Crystal conveys a sense of language being part of a broader revolution alongside the internet: 'If the internet is a revolution, then it is likely to be a linguistic revolution.'
Despite not delving into the nitty-gritty of his book—since that is not the primary goal of my text—I felt compelled to contextualize my thoughts on language within a setting where linguistic differences are bound to loom large in their broadest sense. While we shouldn’t overstate the global nature of the internet, given that its force and predominance remain largely in the hands of well-off individuals from developed countries, its principles are evolving rapidly, aligning with economic shifts and the gradual effacement of virtual and micro-geographic boundaries. As a result of this rumbustious anarchic fabric of language and its unbridled verve, the model of speech are constantly evolving and changing.
Why doesn’t this alter our perception of accent? Both its flexibility and situational adaptability within the speaker universe, as well as the approach to its deciphering? Perhaps it’s about embracing its rebellious nature, acknowledging its limits, and rethinking how we approach what is still absent in ELT books and courses.
One way to think about it is to focus more on its frontier zones and indivisible aspects, like its nebulous qualities and inherently contingent nature, rather than trying to decode it with predictable patterns. Accepting the ineffable nature of language — this applies to both listening and speaking.
The way an accent comes together, in its form and architecture, is necessarily diverse and contingent from the outset. There are zones of indiscernibility that prevent us from categorically pinpointing a speaker's origin or journey. Even in the history of accents, sounds are continuously broken down and reintegrated. This conflictive nature of accents may stir the pot, but it can also have tangible benefits.
Following this exploration into sounds and accent, the Scouse accent and Multicultural London English (MLE) are distinct, but both reflect a mix of identities and linguistic influences shaped by migration, social change, and historical contact. MLE, on the other hand, is a fluid, evolving accent that emerged in London’s multicultural communities. It incorporates sounds from Caribbean English (particularly Jamaican Patois), South Asian languages like Punjabi and Bengali, as well as traditional Cockney and Estuary English features. MLE is often marked by changes in vowel pronunciation (e.g., face sounding more like fehs), a distinct th-stopping (e.g., that becoming dat), and a specific rhythm influenced by non-native English speakers. Despite their differences, both Scouse and MLE are products of cultural and linguistic blending.
Circling back to the earlier point about one of the driving forces of the film, Stephen Graham – the life and soul of the film in my completely biased opinion – he outstandingly epitomizes this mishmash of accents materialised in an individual whose identity is primarily marked by his multifaceted and intricately layered subjectivity as a dynamically evolving actor.
Despite having taken part in a plethora of film productions and tv shows scattered all over the world, he is undoubtedly regarded as one of the most influential and quintessential British actors. He was born in Kirkby, a town in the Borough of Knowsley, in the surroundings of Liverpool. The city has historically been part Lancashire, having its large population composed of Irish catholic descent as a result of massive immigration into the areas inside Liverpool. Additionally, Stephen stems from a multi ethnic background, as he had a Swedish grandmother and Jamaican grandfather.
Notably, however, his English is remarkably permeated by Scouse sound patterns, the Liverpool accent that has Irish, Welsh, and Northern English influences, along with traces of Scandinavian and Dutch due to Liverpool’s maritime history. In view of this caleidoscope of fluctuating historical repercussions, It would be ludicrous and nonsensical if we turned a blind eye to the fact that his references and role models - which are, hands down, chronicled in richly diverse and strikingly unclassified language system. Most significantly, it hinders us from labeling his English in the face of a stigmatized framework of sounds and characteristics that would be immediately spotted and considered as a broad, robust accent in need of interpretation.
Many times I have addressed this nuanced yet volatile topic that revolves around the pinballing nature of sound shapes. Apparently, this what Boiling point captures on a deeper level - its layered scenes furnishes the spectator to circumnavigate the dizzying logistical fet of the single camera take and it's perfect choreography in a combination of labyrinthine images, hugely stressful dialogues and the humdrum of a in-depth look into the daily grind of labour in a nerve-jangling night shift in a restaurant kitchen. Despite its spectacular scenes and moments of terrifying discombobulation due to its raw atmosphere and stiflingly circumscribed workplace, the film is constantly reminding us that other aspects are at play, such as the language embodied within the dialogue and heated wrangles over the film, and they would serve as a deceive to loosen up and ease the tension. The tension takes over and the seemingly amicable and plastic relationship among co-workers lies in tatters, barrelling toward one of the most nerve-racking nights of their lives.
Undeniably, Stephen’s character, a renowned, top-notch chef working in a spicy, stress-inducing kitchen in central London, is keenly aware of his continent and malleable identity. Being immersed in a tiny workplace encircled by voices and culture from different walks of life is a flawless depiction of a melting pot of cultures coexisting regardless of their divergences. There is a grain of truth to the fact that he is not a pure or indelibly English per ser, which is emphatically and incessantly spotlighted either through the lack of stereotyped set of personality and sound traits, and the profoundly emphatic emphasis placed on the hodgepodge of different Englishes and identities in that boiling hot conglomeration of people.
Meanwhile, Camille shrewdly gleaned the dire consequences language may bring about in human relationships. She noticed that her chef, Stephen Graham as Andy, was constantly quickening his pace and carrying out bare essential tasks in a roundabout way, completely out of sync in relation to the whole group. Even though language should reify the substance of real and communication, it no longer implies individuals are on the same page on what is being conveyed through words, causing all attempts to build a shared repartition of meaning both a betrayal or a kaleidoscope of misunderstandings.
Regardless of the advisable actions to mitigate communication setbacks in this context, reading the room for both verbal and nonverbal room beyond the realms of possibility.
Working under pressure and needing to grapple with language barriers, was not an illustration of resilience and persistence; on the contrary, her sinuous and inconspicuous appearance in the film, in truth, elicits a certain sense of indignation and frustration. Despite the supposedly dismantled barriers of an idealized globalized world—one restructured in the wake of the pandemic, where the boundaries between the virtual and the real would ostensibly collide—what ultimately emerges is the disheartening and gloomy realization that there is little to be done but to come to terms with the ineffable impact that language, in its most potent form, exerts upon reality. There is no happy ending at all.
This scene in the film seems to metaphorize, in a diffuse and protracted collision between theory and practice, something that Richard Cauldwell sets out to illustrate by exploring the interplay of the invisible, transient, and speedy within the chapter "The Window on Speech." This grim and gloomy atmosphere, brought about by the knots and misalignments of language, is also symptomatic of a pivotal issue we strive to evade and remedy at all costs: the re-substantiation of the invisible substance of speech. In fact, this substance is, in Cauldwell’s words, a transient, non-tangible object that, the moment it comes into existence, immediately vanishes. By and large, there is an unremitting cycle of perpetual appearing, disappearing, and replenishing.
As a reminder, unlike the work of written language, spoken language is ineffable, non-tangible and highly variable, mainly because words have the property of plasticity, that is to say, the capacity to change their shape according to the neighboring words. In the same vein, the stream of speech varies in levels of realization, as sounds may present different peaks of mountainous areas inside their structured valleys.
Final thoughts : where are we headed for?
On a theoretical note, one novel way of tackling this issue is by constructing piece-by-piece a speech model to help us describe what is at play when interaction strikes. As the illustration from the film, spontaneous speech is unscripted, and though it contains prefabricated and ready-made formulae - from idioms to fixed phrases - most of the language is created at the moment of speaking, in an entangled process encompassing changes of mind, sensations, emotions, errors, receptions, external noise, pauses and unpredictable elements. Caudwell suggests compensatory and coping strategies, such as guesswork or the application of contextual knowledge alongside the attempt to create a speech model to describe part of what might be Trapped in the Velcro we only half-heartedly attempt to peel away within this entanglement of sounds.
On a more exploratory and experimental note, historicization might be an astute way of wading the battle against the substance of sounds. How can we reach this ever-evolving mishmash of sounds and its historical nuances by historicizing them? That’s the crux of the problem. it should actually be considered as a primary part of grappling with language unpredictably dynamic.
This is something basically offered by films, books, podcasts and a wide variety of media platforms. Historicization is no longer a name strictly confined to academic research or scholar work. It’s rather a matter of dissecting language and taking it to extremes- setting out to investing and pushing boundaries to the limit. Observe how language behaves in contexts we have never imagined or envisioned before. Without a shadow of doubt, it takes a village to cultivate this approach to language, which is neither rocket science nor the reinvention of the wheel.