That’s right, no?

Reg­u­lar read­ers will re­call that not that long ago I wrote a col­umn called “The cul­ture of no”, be­moan­ing the fact that as a cus­tomer I am often met with the an­swer “No” in my adopted cul­ture, an as­pect that com­pares very un­favourably with other cul­tures I’ve lived in, such as the US and Japan. Well, this col­umn could equally be called “The cul­ture of no”, but for an en­tirely dif­fer­ent rea­son.

You see, as soon as you start liv­ing here you be­come ac­cus­tomed to hear­ing “no?” as a ques­tion tag at the end of many a sen­tence, in the same way that the French say “n’est-ce pas?” or the Japan­ese “desu neh?” As read­ers will no doubt be aware, many na­tive Eng­lish speak­ers even in­te­grate the “no?” ques­tion tag into Eng­lish after spend­ing a cer­tain amount of time in the local cul­ture, so sim­ple and wide­spread is its use. In fact, a ques­tion such as “This is yours, no?” is not un­com­mon even among Eng­lish speak­ers who do not live in cul­tures where “no?” is the dom­i­nant form.

When asked to trans­late this, most Eng­lish teach­ers will say the equiv­a­lent is some­thing like “right?”, as in “This is yours, right?” How­ever, as an Eng­lish teacher trainer I have also looked on in de­spair as well-in­ten­tioned teach­ers have at­tempted to teach their stu­dents the in­cred­i­bly com­plex Eng­lish tag ques­tion form, as in “This is yours, isn’t it?” – it may look in­no­cent enough, but try break­ing down the as­so­ci­ated gram­mar and, more im­por­tantly, pro­nun­ci­a­tion rules at­tached to it – or even the eas­ily re­called and im­ple­mented but so­cially awk­ward “cor­rect?”, as in “This is yours, cor­rect?” (I kid you not).

Now, de­spite the con­vo­luted na­ture of my pre­am­ble, the more per­cep­tive among you will have re­alised where I’m headed with this... and that is the use of a pos­i­tive or a neg­a­tive word to ask for con­fir­ma­tion of a state­ment, es­sen­tially the pur­pose of a tag ques­tion.

I would argue that the Eng­lish “right?” is an af­fir­ma­tive lex­i­cal means of ver­i­fy­ing the cor­rect­ness of our as­ser­tion, whereas “no?” is very clearly a neg­a­tive one. To my mind, and I must tread care­fully here so as not to cause cul­tural of­fence – as al­ways,take it as a mere ob­ser­va­tion, dear reader – this is a sign of the com­par­a­tive lev­els of self-con­fi­dence in the dif­fer­ent cul­tures: na­tive Eng­lish speak­ers are es­sen­tially de­mand­ing agree­ment with there af­fir­ma­tive use of lan­guage, whereas the “no?” ques­tion tag dis­plays a cer­tain lack of con­fi­dence. Cue out­rage at my in­so­lence.

But there you are, you see, the proof is in the pud­ding: being British, I have few qualms about as­sert­ing my rather boor­ish view of lan­guage use onto my un­sus­pect­ing read­ers, so high are my lev­els of self-con­fi­dence. And just to round these mus­ings off with a hope­fully hu­mourous anec­dote, many moons ago I an­nounced this the­ory of mine in Cata­lan on a train­ing course full of Cata­lans – in fact I was the only non-Cata­lan in a room of some 20 peo­ple. After sev­eral sec­onds filled with frowns and per­plexed looks, one man spoke up – in Cata­lan – and said to the group “Però es que no fem això, no?” For­tu­nately for me, that broke the ten­sion some­what.