Accent Discrimination

By Madeleine Kando

I speak English as if it were my native language. My native language is Hungarian, but I was too young when I left, so I no longer speak it. It is buried beneath other languages that I had to learn on the way to adulthood. I am a language mutt, you might say. Were it not for my accent, which I am told is French, I could impersonate the most diehard native English speaker. 

The only language that I speak without an accent is French, because I learnt it before my speech apparatus settled itself in the comfortable language groove that native speakers always dig for themselves. But before I could learn my multiplication tables, my French had to be tucked away in the bottom of my backpack, when we moved from Paris to Amsterdam. I learnt Dutch quickly and perfectly, without anyone noticing that I was an imposter. Or so I thought.

The problem is, that you cannot hear your own voice the way other people hear it, unless you use a recording device. The fact that I couldn’t hear my own accent protected me from the harsh reality that when people heard me speak, they saw a French duck, but I thought of myself as a Dutch swan.

Kachru's Three Circles of English

English is the Lingua Franca of the world. Non-native speakers use English to communicate with each other, which allows an Eskimo to speak to a Pigmy, to a Dutchman or a Russian without having to learn all these languages. He only has to learn English and presto, he is able to attend a Pigmy conference on how to grow taller, a Dutch workshop on how to build dykes, or read a manual on how to install a samovar in his igloo.

Of the one and a half billion people in the world who speak English, only 380 million are native speakers. Not only are they in the minority, but most of them are ‘mono-lingual’. They only speak one language. Who can blame them? Why bother learn another language if everybody else speaks your language?

Accent Discrimination

English is the undisputed global ruler, but there is English and then there is English. Speaking English without an accent (called neutral English), immediately puts you in a privileged position on the chessboard of life. You could have five post-graduate degrees and an IQ of 180, but none of that matters when you are a person in the possession of an accent. There are jobs and even entire careers that I would not waste my time applying for, knowing that I have a foreign accent. Can you imagine the President of the United States delivering the State of the Union with a French accent? People would roll on the floor laughing.

Accent racism is a result of our basic desire to classify others, to group them in a certain hierarchy and to differentiate friend from foe.* It is a global phenomenon, but it is ironic that ‘neutral English’ should be the norm when two third of English speakers have an accent. It’s like asking the entire male population to wear a crew-cut because a minority of American men are subjected to this atrociously disfiguring custom when they enlist in the army.

Although there are strict laws that protect individuals from accent discrimination, at least in the workplace, (part of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

The question is: Are we blaming the messenger instead of the message? Should the language itself be on trial here? Considering how many vowel sounds there are, is it possible that English is harder to pronounce than other languages? What’s the difference between ‘sit’,‘set’,‘sat’ and ‘seat’? Or ‘root’, ‘rot’, ‘rut’, and ‘rout’? And then, there is ‘bear, beer, bar, boar and burr’. When my Hungarian born mother skyped me in a panic, telling me that there was a shit stuck in her printer I laughed so hard, I almost fell off my chair. I told her to pull on the shit gently and pull it out from between the rollers.

My Dutch husband has his own battle to fight with our adopted language. When we visited a plant nursery a while ago and he asked the salesman if he had any Jews for sale, the poor man’s face showed total bewilderment. We wanted to create a natural fence in our yard and my husband prefers yews over other species of hedges. I don’t know why he mixes up the ‘j’ and the ‘y’ sound. It’s not like Dutch doesn’t have them both. But he also likes to wear his favorite yacket, tell funny yokes and uses Jahoo as his search engine.

English is often thought to have the largest vocabulary of any language.** It has more than 200,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. (French has 59,000 words). Additionally, no other language has as many words to say the same thing. Something can be big, colossal, enormous, gigantic, huge, immense, massive, tremendous, humongous, a whopper, etc. English also has a tendency to use a single word to mean different things. The word ‘set’ has an incredible 58 uses as a noun. You can set a bone, be all set for a trip, set the rules, be set in your ways, own a TV set, etc. But you could argue that once you speak a language like a native, the complexity of it doesn’t matter. You apply your neutral accent to any amount of words that are thrown at you.

Even though I have an accent, I confess that I suffer from accent discrimination. It is a result of a basic need to fit in. It makes me ‘more royal than the King’, you might say. That is the trouble with us ‘non-native speakers’. We aim to please. We not only have to learn the grammar, vocabulary, intonation and the rhythm of a second language, but when it comes to American English, we have to pretend we have a hot potato in the back of our throat to produce the dreaded ‘rhotic’ R sound. If you are from Spain or France, there is no way you will loose the habit of pronouncing the ‘R’ like rolling marbles in your mouth. That's what 'R's are meant to do, or they wouldn't be called 'R', would they? English either kicks the ‘R’ sound right out the door, like in New England (pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd), or shoves it in the back of your mouth where it gets boiled by the hot potato. To make matters worse, Americans like to swallow most of their vowels and replace them with the ‘schwa’ sound. It’s the ‘uh’ sound in ‘balloon’, ‘problem, ‘family’, ‘bottom’ and so on.

Some people argue that there is no such thing as accent discrimination. Having an accent is not like having dark skin or being born a woman. Those are legitimate areas of discrimination because you cannot change your sex or your race. But you can change your accent if you really work at it.

Oh really? How many of us who learnt English past the critical period (around age 10), are able to get rid of their accent? It would take years of speech therapy. Not only that, but trying to get rid of your accent is like trying to make a dog sound like a cat. The way you speak is as much part of you as the color of your hair, or the shape of your nose. It would require linguistic surgery to alter your speech pattern, the tone of your voice and your accent.

Maybe English will follow in the footsteps of Latin. Latin was the Lingua Franca of the vast Roman Empire. Its colloquial form was called Vulgar Latin, which morphed into the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian etc.) Is neutral English slowly morphing into what is called ‘Englishes’ (Singlish, Spanglish, etc.), and will eventually disappear like Classical Latin did?

As the world gets smaller, it is surprising how little tolerance there is for accents. But what a bland, unimaginative place the world would be without accents. American actress Amy Walker gives a brilliant performance of the different American accents:

If you are the owner of an accent, my advice to you is to lay it on thick. Usually it will charm a certain percentage of the people around you and the rest? Well, you can please some people some of the time but you cannot please all the people all the time. So there! leave comment here

* There were times in history when accent discrimination served a useful purpose. The Dutch under Nazi occupation tested suspected German agents by asking them to pronounce the name of the Dutch town ‘Scheveningen’. ** see: Which Language Has The Most Words?