Stutter and Stammer

Stutter

It is a great matter of concern. It is in today’s South Africa very common to hear someone stuttering. Typically you would hear it in a phone-in programme on radio. A person is not confident as he/she is on air, in addition the English that the person speaks is second or third language. But it is far from only in such exposed situations as you can hear people stammer. It has become more common also in ordinary meetings where people are familiar with circumstances as in university classes and in church.

Here I want to address two things, first the very fact that stutter easily aggravates a sense of insecurity while talking, the second thing being my conviction that in most cases something can be done about it. In short, a stutterer still has the potential to become a great speaker, orator.

One suffers with the one who stutters. He knows pretty well what to say. Maybe this is not always the case with people who phone-in. They may not know what to say and therefore become unsure of themselves. Those who stutter as a regular feature know pretty well what to say, but aggravates the situation by repeating what was there to say and thus burdens the listener even more. There is no doubt about the fact that when stutter has become a part of your life, the fact that you never reach the point of clarity, never get the message through in a straightforward way, eats away your self confidence.

Secondly, I am convinced that many who stutter can eventually do away with it in a permanent way. The person must spend for himself or herself, talking, practise phraseology, talking to the wall or even better at sea, as did the great orator to be, Demosthenes in Greece 384 – 322 Before Christ. You don’t need to be a first language speaker to speak the language well. It should be a priority for those of us, who for example use English as second language, but use it a lot, to learn to master it so as to be intelligible and convincing.