As an immigrant of US origin in Switzerland I have personally been subject to discrimination because of my accent, both in my work and in dealing with local infrastructure. Although I speak French fluently, my American accent immediately elicits judgements about who I am and what I think, and specifically that I am less capable than my European counterparts. I had to retrain in my profession when I moved here 25 years ago and my accent coupled with not infrequent grammatical errors as I was becoming used to speaking daily in French led many of my colleagues to treat me as if I was ignorant. I had seen this happen so many times in my native California to nonnative English speakers, and it was an eye-opener to experience it first hand. I would like to thank Professor Rey Agudo for this interesting and accurate piece.
39
In language, it's not hitting the target, it's aiming at it. A standard isn't an achievement that can't be reached, and in language is subject to change, but must be aimed for. Otherwise there is no social currency to agree on across boundaries.
6
I adore the way Australians speak! The first time I became aware of the Aussie accent was hearing the marvelous accents of Olivia Newton-John. There's no rhyme or reason to why I find the accent so thrilling- one of my hobbies is trying to analyze how it works and attempt to imitate it just for the fun of it. Part of its allure would seem to be how subtle it is - you have to listen very closely to pick up how those gorgeous vowels actually contrast in their formation compared to British or American pronunciations. The whole idea of a continent shaped like a flower so far away from its English-speaking forbears adds not a little to the charm of the people of "Oz" and their manner of speaking!
8
If the article goes on to offer evidence that everyone does indeed have an accent, well then... duh!
4
When I came to America from Lebanon in 1959, not knowing English and learning mostly from cartoons, they used to call me Frenchie. I was 6.
7
My paternal grandmother, a French speaking child from Canada, was called Frenchie by her US classmates. They made fun of her until one of the parish priest spoke with her in French, then they were impressed.
12
Its not an accent that makes my neck hairs stand up, rather its the sheer laziness of most Americans in their usage. Slurred speech, dropped consonants and vowels, too many ums, uhs and "you know". ("You know what I'm saying?" my nemesis)
Its the wrong use of terms, by those trying too hard to sound smart. ("Speak plainly", I think, distracted and already not caring about the content.) Its the constant barrage of slang and four-letter words, even among children, that gets me going. (I'm no saint as I can string epithets together like a pro, but only when needed)
Its those who introduce an accent for no reason but to remind me/us they are Spanish-speakers, or those who have adopted the practice so to be politically sensitive. Why, I ask, why is the first name Sarah not accented, but the last name Gonzalez is suddenly out of no where dripping with it? Gon-zah-leehz. Why not Za-rah too?
A Robert Brady doesn't introduce himself with a plain spoken Robert, then a Brady covered in a British accent?
Or those looney newscasters who are now pronouncing Putins first name as Vlah-deer-meer. Vla-da-mir is fine!
Again, its not accents, its the laziness in how people choose to speak. Their lack of effort to choose the right words for their style. Its reaching for $1 words, when a good old nickel word would do. Its trying to be absurdly politically sensitive to pronunciations, like there are points awarded for the sudden exactitude.
Accents are great. Its dopey speakers that irk.
12
This is so much a part of the anti-immigrant sentiments that it is great that it is being discussed,
First a funny story. I am the child of German immigrants, learned German first, so when I entered school they carefully worked with me one on one to fix the v - f issue. As I recall this was done pretty quietly and included a lot more children than just my "accent" who had some speech issues, which is pretty common. I was telling this story at work .. and they said .. wait they gave you special lessons in how to speak .. New Jersey ..
Anyhow, speaking German fairly fluently, I can attest that
a) you do not need to understand every word someone says to communicate and enjoy their company. If I can understand 50% of a German or Austrian or Bavarian or Swiss speaking, I can usually have a conversation
b) speaking is really hard. Idioms are hard to learn. Real time selection of verb tenses, phrases, etc while trying to conduct a conversation in real-time is very difficult. You can try to slur your word endings .. but yes, in language 2 or 3 or 4, you will sometimes say things wrongly.
c) judging people by their accent or word selection who are speaking a 2nd or 3rd language is ridiculous. 10th grade in your second language is really hard .. How's that high school spanish !
Oh and a C student who doesn't understand the Chinese PhD making 20K a year who is trying to explain basic physics .. their accent is not the issue.
16
Oh no, no no no! If you want me to prove this, visit the annual ethnic fair in Montgomery County Maryland! There is a booth for Albanians, for Japanese, for Irish and for Scots and for Welsh, and for all those others. But there is, of course, NO booth for the English, because, you see, it is all those others that are the ethnic groups: just look at English postage stamps if you don't believe me: all the other nations have their country's name on their stamps. Not the English! (Me? I am Scotch Irish).
2
Yes, quite true.
English has accent; Germans have accent; Southerners have accent; New Yorkers have accent; everyone has accent. So, stop being a racist.
15
Bravo!
4
Tell the landlord you will pay rent advance for 2 years or buy the condo cash down, see how quickly the rent bias disappears !!
It's not really native versus non-native. How many times I have heard ohhh you are from france/england your accent is so cute so melodious and if you are from India ohhh can't understand a word of what you say your accent is so thick.
Like it or not it's not as much about nativism as much as it is about race. Face it !
18
As an undergraduate, I took first year calculus with an Indian instructor. His accent was close to impenetrable. Nonetheless, after a couple of weeks, most of us came to understand him. Once that occurred, we realized that he was a brilliant teacher. I made sure that I stayed with him for second and third terms.
A year later, I took linear algebra with a native American English speaker. His teaching method was talking to the blackboard, writing with one hand and erasing with the other.
Needless to say, I learned much more from the former, while I needed to teach myself with the latter.
14
There are no means to teach math verbally, it must be done with symbols which are easily presented visually. That means that you and the class could see what he meant and then determined what he was saying.
3
I once had a Chinese grad student who had such good pronunciation in English that it took me a while to realize her comprehension was not any better than her colleagues who were struggling a bit!
4
Everything is a problem that must be corrected for us to reach the end of history.
This notion is why I can’t get behind any of this social justice rot.
7
When I went to college in Bawlmer,(Baltimore) the star player on the Orioles was Boog Pail.(Powell)
6
Let's be clear : (1) "an accent" is a common human thing: an audible variation 'partagée' by all the Persons 'qui partagent' the same variation inside a larger tongue. How many Persons ? Between a few and a few thousand. (2) Any "accent" is audible by contrast(s) with "aceent-s" differents of one token as the reference of the comparison. (3) Thus an "accent" is not a personnal thing. (4) The timber, or the tone of any human voice is unique in both genders ; it's a component of every Humanised Person, whatsoever the tongue spoken. (5) Then caution please : don not confuse a personnal 'timber' of a voice (yours or anyone, each has one) and "an accent, [A comment from a swiss french speaking ethnograph in Europe ; my two chidren were born in Paris & they speak spanish as their second mother-tongue; they were caught in Fribourg/ Freiburg (Switzerland), when they told to french speaking local children: "You have a strange accent ["un drôle d'accent"]; caught hearing their friends, boys & girls, to reply to them: "You too are speaking with an accent. Not the same as our. another one. A French accent. Maybe a Parisian one."]
3
Of course everyone has an accent! Having an accent is based on the creation of a norm that is in the center of a spectrum. Saying that someone has an accent is based on perspective as viewed from the center of that norm. It’s neither good nor bad.
Accent assignment depends on perspective and the point of measurement.
Then there is the other issue of class as determined by accent. It is absolutely true in every culture that there is a class identity associated with certain accents.
Some people with good ears can code-switch: they can change their accent based on the culture of those they are with. Most everyone does this with varying degrees of success. The book “Pygmalion” and musical “My Fair Lady” are based entirely on this idea; that one can change their perceived status by changing their accent to reflect what has been determined to be the higher class accent.
In my line of work (speech pronunciation and improvement), our clients each have their own reasons for learning the American accent. Sometimes it is in order to “fit in”. More often it’s to be able to be better understood in a professional setting. We do have clients who are worried about being pigeonholed into a certain class designation, and those who simply don’t like the way they sound. Some are perfectionists, linguistic athletes one might say, who strive to have the best American accent they can have. All of them can be helped to achieve their dreams.
5
I have lived in the U S since 1978, and had taught at the University of Michigan for 26 years. I never tried to speak like a native because, first of all, there was no way!! Secondly, my Thai friend who later became the Ambassador of a European country once told me -- we never were colonized, we don't need to speak like them!-- keep your Thai identity!
I met a man in 1997 and kept the relationship until 2017-- in twenty years, he understood everything and even complimented me on my English writing skill. There were words I used-- that I learned from Thailand-- that he never knew and had to look them up- and also in twenty years, his hearing had gone south. One day he abruptly said after I told him he gave me a wrong answer to my question, "you have an accent!!! You need to learn to speak proper English!"----- the end of many stories ! And Amen.
8
True, there are no accent free dialectics of any language. However, at least trying to adapt to the dialect spoken where one lives helps social acceptance in every human society. I was once with an American Spanish teacher in Madrid who was told by a shop keeper that his accent was not truly Spanish because it was not Castilian. I have known well educated people who adapted their accents and those who deliberately exaggerated their accents as a indicator of pride by not adapting. The right goal is communication not defending one’s ego, because language is for communicating more easily. But people are complex beings and sometimes even language is used for non-verbal communication purposes.
5
I write this as someone who has (a) travelled quite a bit, & (b) taught ESL. There are cultural differences in how helpful natives are to those with either minimal or moderate knowledge of their language. I've never studied Spanish & I've been in Mexico several times. I've 'communicated' using a Spanish/English dictionary. Mexicans were generally helpful & gracious is helping me to communicate. The French were generally awful in that respire. I had studied French for many years, read major French novels in the original and had a vocabulary which was probably the equivalent of the average 6- year old. & yet, because my accent was foreign, most, though nor all
French people excluded me, acting like they couldn't understand what I was saying. Americans, I believe are somewhere in between the Mexicans & the French in terms of trying to be helpful to those who are obvious foreigners, with limited vocabulary & difficult to decipher accents.
6
My terrible French was not a source of distain in the outlying neighborhoods of Paris but very much so in the heart where there are many visitors. It kind of depends upon people’s attitudes towards strangers.
7
Accent is just a tonal variable. Everything that speaks has an accent of some sort. A parking ticket machine in a Chicago garage once spoke to me with the accent of Steven Hawking's talk box. Yes, it was amusing.
3
To add, I’ve lived in Bruxelles, Belgium and found it very interesting that the minute I could speak passable French, everyone wanted to practice their English on me.
8
I grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania. I was shocked when after moving to northern New Jersey someone told me I had an accent. My husband (from mid central PA) regularly made fun of my pronunciation of water, creek and drawing. I now live near Charlotte NC and am working on a Charleston SC accent. Just so I can pass.
6
I am college educated, was raised working class in southern Appalachia, and speak an Appalachian dialect among family.
I have a southern accent which I can switch out of easily, but I choose to speak with my accent in most cases. I'm proud of the fact that I sound like my family when I talk, not like the "neutral" television accent that all educated people are supposed to have. I read long ago that "accentless" English is just a Kansas City accent anyway.
Southern speech is characterized by polite circumlocution and understatement which contains many layers of meaning. Many of us find the directness with which people from other parts of the country speak startling and even downright rude. Commands or requests are often implied rather than spoken. Long pauses are used for emphasis and extra syllables are added (words can even be somewhat sung) to convey emotion or alter meaning. Our word "y'all" is a distinct second person plural pronoun (think "vos" in Spanish) which standard English lacks.
But the victors write the history books (and the language books too). I've watched northern and west-coast people's eyes gloss over as soon as they heard my accent many a time. Because all southerners are dumb, right? Every year the list of groups it's socially acceptable to be bigoted towards gets shorter, and it's a good thing too. Wonder when Gomer Pyle and I will get ourselves marked off that thar list. I reckon they keep it up in New York City somewhere.
12
I never thought I had an accent until I began teaching in a middle school in my own state of New Jersey. I was born and raised in northern New Jersey and I taught 122 miles away in southern New Jersey. Spelling tests were a particular problem. I never realized that I don’t pronounce the “h” in human or huge. Also I became self conscious when saying coffee or chocolate. Even now after living in South Jersey for over 40 years I’m shocked when I hear a recording of my voice. I’m still so North Jersey.
7
I have no problem with accents of any kind. But it would be nice if we could finally expunge from the spoken English language (as used in MANY places all over the English-speaking word, not just Queens and Brooklyn) the grammatical abomination "youse".
1
My grandparents, who came from Vienna, Austria in the early 20th century sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
3
I am a native English speaker with a strong nonstandard accent: New York working class. Think The Situation on the MTV reality television show “Jersey Shore”, only without the vulgarity. My accent has been a significant problem for me throughout my career. I regularly experience accent shaming. While I was earning my Ph.D. at Princeton one of my professors told me that my speech was evocative of the speech of “the very lowest classes”. He went on to say that speaking as I do it would it be inappropriate for me to seek a position as a university faculty member. For that and other reasons I pursued a career in industrial research.
Today I am semi-retired and hold an adjunct faculty appointment at Harvard Extension School. I prepare every lecture with dread. My concern is not about my intelligibility. I speak slowly and annunciate each word very carefully, reinforcing what I say with PowerPoint slides. Rather my dread is a class thing. I easily imagine my Harvard students’ great distain for my speech.
7
Shame on anyone who judges you when you speak, it says volumes about them and nothing about you. Keep your head high!
12
I grew up in Schenectady, New York but have lived in Nebraska for nearly 40 years. I enjoy returning to upstate NY for a visit so I can hear people speak without an accent. I'm sure any Nebraskan living in New York feels the same way when he returns to Nebraska for a visit.
4
I am 72 and have lived in America for 49 years. I was born in India, and started learning (Indian) English in the eighth grade. Of course, I have an accent, and even after decades living in this country often I have "immigrant's hesitation." However, I have also traveled in fifty countries, and have learned, as the author says, everyone has an accent, even in their country of their birth. It's the effectiveness of your communication and self confidence that determine how successful (or happy) you are in the public.
There is nothing wrong in having an accent, don't let it affect your life negatively.
7
What exactly is wrong with asking someone with a non-native accent where they're from? Most people love talking about themselves. And when you're getting to know someone for the very first time in a social situation, what more interesting thing would there even be to ask?
6
I fully agree. My country of birth is Switzerland, and I was already past 40 years old when I came to live in the USA. My accent has very often been a reason for people to start a conversation with me and has even lead to nice friendships. So there is nothing wrong or bad about having an accent.
10
I am torn between trying to share my own stories of family origin and the right of other Americans to be left in peace without feeling they are somewhat lesser because their parents are from Asian, Southern Europe, or heaven forbid, Central or South America.
However, since many people who are first or second generation Americans have complained about this, and sure it woud be annoying if every colleague, every person in the bar is constantly asking about it ..
civility would require that you leave this be.
If you really want to discuss multiculturalism, maybe start by discussing your own family first ..
And just because you are supposedly "woke" doesn't mean that all immigrants trust you not to regale them to 2nd or 3rd tier status once they reveal their origin.
5
As a consulting software engineer, I have worked with many people for whom English is a second or third language at least. A couple of decades ago, I led a project in New York City where the developers came from Nigeria, Japan, India, China, Ukraine & elsewhere. There was only one developer whose native language was English. He was from Glasgow, Scotland (you can see where this is going). He did not speak with what is called a "Standard Scottish English (SSE) accent," but with the regional accent sometimes called "Glaswegian patter." He also spoke Scots Gaelic. Even in Scotland, people from Aberdeen or Edinburgh have considerable trouble "translating" Glaswegian into SSE. I found that I could barely understand a sentence he said, though I understood the English of the rest of the crew. I finally asked him to email me since it was a bit easier to decipher the written Glaswegian. Still, he was the best programmer on my team & I couldn't have done without him.
10
I’m reminded of an episode of ‘Frazier,’ where Roz, the resident nymphomaniac, swooned over the lower-class cockney accent of Daphne’s brother. Roz said it was so sophisticated!
As for me, I’m still stuck with my NYC accent (actually, Bronx), and despite my TWO post-graduate degrees.......well, fuggetaboutit.....I still sound like a dummy to many people.
11
My Austrian grandmother could "roll her r's" as we called her beautiful trill when children. I grew up in the same household so had plenty of exposure. I trundled off to college where I elected German as my required language, studied hard, came home and behold still could not trill. A guttural r was all I could manage on a good day. Even my mother did better and she had spoken little but English since beginning school. Everyone was having a good laugh at my expense until it turned on them. Neither I saw could pronounce a "th" sound. It always sounded like a hard "t". As the only college grad in the house I pointed out their error and added that they sounded uneducated and best practice. I've repressed their response to the smarty.
2
I have an American-born Chinese friend who married a guy from China. He was a very intelligent person and needed to get a professional license in the US. Despite living here for quite a few years, and living with a native English speaker, and working in an English-speaking environment, his accent was so strong that it was almost impossible to understand what he said a lot of the time. He was never able to pass the test of spoken English and eventually had to return to China. He was incredibly resistant to the idea that his accent was a problem and began to claim that the problem was not his, but ours, because we needed to work harder on understanding him. At one point, trying to help him, I made a lot of phone calls to various accent reduction experts and programs. The minute I said that he had failed the test multiple times already, almost everyone said immediately "Is he Asian?" No one ever said, "Is he Swedish"!
3
Not uncommon situation as many science majors complain that their Asian teaching assistants make "assistance" impossible.
3
Chinese dialects are very different from European languages and humans learn which sounds are those of languages an not when they are very young. This young person just did not perceive the differences between his pronunciation and others so that he could adapt. It was more like being tone deaf with respect to music than his attitude.
2
How well communication works has little to do with accent, unless the accent is so strong as to make words or whole phrases hard to comprehend. In such cases, vocabulary and syntax are usually more important limitations, anyway.
Apart from preconceived stereotypes and prejudices about accents (rarely overcome by being defensive about an accent), there are two common ways in which a speakers' accent can encumber conversation:
1. A "native" accent" speaker is distracted by wanting to know "where" a "foreign" accent "came from."
2. A "foreign accent" speaker is distracted by not wanting to discuss his/her accent while conversing about something else.
Solutions to these encumbrances are no mystery either:
1. "Native" speakers can show interest and empathy, adjust pace and complexity of dialogue to levels comfortable for both parties, use clarifying confirmation to facilitate mutual understanding, and directly correct language mistakes only when necessary or clearly desired by "foreign" speakers. "Natives" can also rein in curiosity about counterparts' language origins, unless nationality or linguistic background are somehow important to the topic of conversation anyway.
2. "Foreign" speakers can try to be as clear and tangible as possible, and use already-tested common examples, short-hand phrases, and clarifying questions, in order to further mutual understanding. And be open to saying something about their personal backgrounds even if not relevant to the topic.
5
I'd say that one of the biggest bias people have is against Southern American accents. I have black and white friends with southern accents and they are consistently looked down upon by others. Mostly, people seem to assume a southern accent means that you are stupid. My white friends also get the added assumption that they are a bigot in some way.
The Mid-west accent is my accent. I think it's a fine way to speak English. I wish I had a British accent though. That accent is just so beautiful you cant help but think the person speaking is smarter and better looking.
8
Accents are not just a matter of Spanish/English. Within American English there are southern accents and "Brooklyn" accents, both of which can trigger ridicule.
2
Interesting piece and timely.
Certainly everybody has an accent and accent bias is simply a reflection of physical bias. One has work against the grain to get beyond the inherent bias.
American fetishization of the French accent might have its roots in Hollywood and Paris's branding as the city of Romance.
What is Winston Churchill spoke with an East Indian accent? Would he considered by American's to be not as brilliant? Much of the world rejects his so called brilliance btw.
When Americans (of all socio-economic classes) hear the Spanish accent , Im willing to bet they would quickly conflate it to a working class Latin immigrant. Similarly they would quickly co-relate an English accent with intelligence and white. No wonder all aliens speak with British accents. And some robots too.
Cultural hegemony plays a part too. I have heard South Asian Muslims for example describe Arabic probably the most beautiful language to listen to. Try selling that to the average American.
I personally prefer the sound of Portuguese and Latin Spanish over Spain-Spanish. The real languages I mean.
And, I hate all accents in English, except when spoken by Winston Churchill sounding profound while articulating well-rehearsed pithy one-liners that is. :)
3
I work internationally as an engineer on data networks. It's a big benefit to my avocation of being an "airline anthropologist". I find it fascinating to to guess where people I meet are from from their faces, and then identifying them by their accents.
I'm getting pretty good at it.
Data networks are an international business, so you find South African's in Australia, and Germans in Argentina (native born). In Buenos Aires a large minority speak Spanish, but with an Italian cadence. You need to parse that to understand what they are saying. Britain alone has 20 or so distinct accents and I need to follow all of them working for British Telecom.
On every conference call we'll have 3, 4, 5, or more "languages" represented. Everyone is speaking English, but you can't hear them properly until you identify their accent: Indian, Mandarin, Israeli, French, Danish, Dutch, .... I use special stereo phone headsets to make this easier.
I learned Castilian Spanish K-12 in the US, but while in Mexico, Peru, Columbia, Costa Rica, Chile, the Philippines (yes they speak Spanish there) my hosts tell me to speak in English. Spanish is a very local language.
It never occurs to me to say "Huh?" when I can't understand somebody. Communication is a 50/50 effort. Always.
7
When a new student first spoke to me I asked: "What's your accent?" His reply: "I have no accent. I speak English the way it is properly spoken in Jamaica." I haven't asked about accents ever again.
15
What's even more fascinating is that Mathew Rhys is an Englishman playing a Russian playing an American In The Americans. In The Wire Season 2 Dominic West pulls of the incredible feat of an Englishman playing an American cop, badly playing an Englishman during a sting operation!
5
He is Welsh as you well know and has received awards for his promotion of the Welsh language. Why don't you ask how he identifies himself ?? It is not English.
3
We’ve been underestimating the large part of our population who are plainly stated RACIST. That is the main reason why people discriminate someone based on their accents. Thank god for Donald Trump for clarifying this reality for us to see.
5
Finally, someone says the obvious. I go to a coffeehouse where a large number of people are from outside the US, whether as an immigrant or as a tourist. Many of them apologize for their accent. I tell them everyone who speaks English has an accent. If you take a Californian and put them in England, the accent becomes obvious. My cousins from the Midwest have an accent - they say "warsh" for wash and "warter" for water. I myself have a Joisey accent. As long as you can understand them, an accent is just a little extra spice. Not bad, just a little different.
2
This person -clearly- has never been to Oregon.
We have no accent at all. People, here in Oregon, speak so commonly flat that we make people from Ohio and their kin sound twangy and blunt.
Plus, if you do have an accent that does gets attention ("Where are you from...?) It's because you have chosen to keep it and have decided not integrate.
No, you don't have to sound like the Queen's English, but you do have to sound as though you wish to belong. That's the real difference and one that Roberto Rey Agudo seems to be avoiding.
Don't blame others for your actions and choices.
2
I have to admit I have a prejudice against the twangy southern accent, both spoken and sung, but it's probably only because I spent 8 of the most unpleasant years of my life, in Arkansas. I think that accent makes the most intelligent people sound kinda dumb. I grew up in the Boston area, and although I've live in 8 states, I still have a slight Boston accent. My Texan/Arkansan son refers to me as his Yankee mom.
The only issue I have with accents is that some people have accents that are so thick I can't understand what they are saying. Too often people with thick accents mispronounce words.
3
As a Midwesterner, I am understood by practically every mainlander I speak to. It's media-standard English, the stuff you hear on the TV and the radio.
Heavy drawls, dialects, creoles and pidgins are something else entirely, and are problems in any sort of communication outside the in-group that speaks them.
1
I grew up in Scranton in the 1960's and 70's. There was a Mid Valley accent ( 4 miles up the road and influenced by eastern European immigrants), a West Scranton Accent, an Old Forge accent( 2 miles down the road-largely an Italian immigrant influence) and a Greater West-Pittston/Pittston one. And there was the ( to us) ugly sounding Wilkes Barre and beyond NEPA accent. That was about 20 miles, all North to South.I could tell where they lived by their accents. So accents are everywhere, and mean little. Yes, you should be understood to benefit from being a speaker of the language, but to complain about accents is to be ignorant. Instead, take the time to focus on WHAT someone is saying, rather than how they are saying it.
3
This is so true. I grew up in metro NYC. I can easily distinguish among native accents from Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Not so much Manhattan to be honest.
I moved to metro Boston and raised my children there. My business required me to interact with people from all over New England, and now I can easily distinguish a native North Shore accent from a New Bedford accent, a Quincy accent from a Cape accent, and a Foxboro accent from a Newport accent.
My business had me on the phone more than anything, however, and I easily distinguished non-native accents from customers in Shrewsbury (Indian), Worcester (Vietnamese), Exeter RI (Korean), Newton (Russian), Fall River (Portuguese by way of Portugal), and Milford (Portuguese by way of Brazil). The key to communication was to listen, patiently, and to respond generously.
5
Hi Kevin. I am from Wilkes-Barre and loved your comment! I don’t recall many accents at home but always remember the slang term “heina” which is slang for another slang of “ain’t it?”
I also agree that we should listen to content instead of pronunciation.
3
As a native speaker of American English from NJ who speaks Spanish as a second language, I would like to share that I have had at times difficulty understanding some American, Australian, and especially, Scottish accents. I’ve never had trouble understanding a Spanish dialect.
It appears to me that both English vowel and consonant sounds come in greater variety and are subject to greater “distortion” than Spanish. I’d love to hear what others think
2
Here's another aspect of accents: they can signal social classes. That, in fact, was the theme for "Pygmalion"/"My Fair Lady."
A lowly street girl, taught to speak "proper" English, fooled British high society. This was Bernard Shaw poking fun at British snobs.
And in movies, Cockney is used to show low social status and "proper" English or the Queen's English denote upper classes. This, even in dramas not even staged in England!
I think an English accent in the US is sign of status. If you watch MSNBC or CNN, you can't miss that obnoxious owl who speaks with an English accent and rattles my nerves with its ear piercing hoots. That owl is selling something but I'm only thinking to mute it.
Ever notice people come back with English accepts after only a week in England but never return from Mexico with Latino accents?
But if we like the people, they don't have "accents" but Irish brogues or southern drawls.
In the 1970's the liberals (of which I count myself one), upgraded Black English into a college subject and insisted it was discrimination to insist AA speak standard American English.
Remember when Obama was given the backwards praise of being "well spoken?"
In SF, the Chinese used to be confined to a few square blocks around Chinatown; they all spoke "broken English." Those that left the ghetto and spoke standard American English got comments on well they spoke! Now the surprise is gone.
Yup, accents are funny things.
2
I was fortunate enough to have immigrant grandparents from Southern Italy and Sicily, both maternal and paternal. So it was natural for me at a young age not to judge or be condescending when they struggled to make themselves understood. I learned to truly listen.
But here's the odd thing. I can tell if a person is from the east, south, or midwest, almost to the state. But as a Californian, I can not differentiate among the states along the Pacific Coast or those which are our immediate neighbors. So naturally, I THOUGHT we, particularly I, was "accent free." That bit of snobbery vanished quickly when I did a little traveling within our borders. It could be Kentucky, Virginia, Illinois, New York, or Boston. I barely completed a sentence before someone exclaimed, "You're from California, aren't you." So, yes, I validate this thesis. We all have accents...ya know... Ree-ly.
3
I just want to note that Matthew Rhys, who plays Philip Jennings in The Americans, has a darn good American accent for a Welshman.
11
All pronunciations are equally valid? Really? I share the inclusivity of this sentiment, but if I go to Italy and my Italian is indecipherable to native speakers, I should improve my pronunciation, or they should stop being language bigots and learn to understand my mangled pronunciation?
7
Henry Kissinger, who immigrated to the United States from Germany at the age of 15, once remarked that he no longer spoke any language without an accent. A foreign accent, that is.
4
Everyone has an accent because accents are always relative to the listener. That includes national newscasters who speak with "the" newscaster accent to my southern ears.
1
Weird. I thought Matthew Rhys is an Englishman speaking with a perfect American accent. I thought the author was going to mention that, but didn’t see it.
1
Not too mention Dominic West and Idris Elba in “The Wire” and Hugh Laurie in “ House”
2
i am fascinated by others' speech patterns and by chance an apt mimic without hearing myself 'change accents'. do any of us, except actors and so on, really hear ourselves? i believe it's a compliment to others.
when i was in london all the cabbies i rode with were convinced i was from london and even pinpointed neighborhoods. one allowed i could have been visiting from canada, accounting for the relatively short ride from the hotel to king's cross station...our asian customers to our westport, conn store never were surprised to hear my 'american' oriental accent, just delighted...when i told another guest at a party in arkansas that i lived in manhattan, she was certain i hailed from kansas....
You only have an accent when you don't sound like the people around you.
A topic for a follow up article could be why other people's accents make you insane. In eastern Massachusetts, the "R" floats around the sentence (the "Mystery of the Floating R") as in "Christiner, I had an idear to let the hahse out of the bonn". For non-natives, puzzling out the meaning of sentences like this can result in some interesting conversations.
Another follow up topic could be why we need to judge other people's socioeconomic class by their accent.
2
Whenever people in the US comment on my English accent I remind them that they, too, speak with an account.
, Pompano Beach always appears to astound them!!
4
"nobody hearing their American accents presumes that they are less capable, less ambitious or less honest than if their R’s had a nicer trill. "
Probably not, but what do they think instead?
Another problem is not knowing when your pronunciation is going to be difficult for a given audience.
Having to work in a second language (and feel dumb) is very educational.
2
As a trucker I travel the 48 contiguous states.
Years ago in a Southern bar, I ordered a beer and then headed to the men’s room.
The drunk at the bar followed me there, and we were standing beside each other at the urninals.
He looked over menacingly and slurred, “Y’all talk fuhny”.
I, more amused than angered replied, “‘I’ talk funny?"
Yes to most of this article, but no to this:
"But such is the privilege of English — and this is key — that nobody hearing their American accents presumes that they are less capable, less ambitious or less honest than if their R’s had a nicer trill."
Wanna bet? Western Europeans mock my American "r's" all the time. Doesn't seem to matter whether they're native English speakers in England or ESL speakers from Germany; they seem to regard the nasal "R's" as the mark of an unsophisticated "ugly American."
On the one hand, a dose of this treatment by speakers of the "Queen's English" might put some arrogant "speak American" folks here in the US in their place. On the other hand, the idea that native English speakers are privileged to never have their accents mocked by non-native English speakers just isn't true.
3
This is great news. I used to think my Spanish had a gringo accent. Now i know there is no correct pronunciation for Spanish. I hope that also applies to grammar, because mine is terrible. I am more fluent in German, but still would not expect to be considered a native speaker. But now I know that nobody else is a native German speaker, and I can speak however I want.
Fantastic. Until someone in a Spanish-speaking country has to try to understand what I'm saying.
Mr. Agudo is simply speaking gibberish. If there are no standards for language structure and pronunciation, there is no common language. Without which, meaningful communication is reduced to emojis. ;-}
4
I think there is value in assimilation as unpopular as that idea is today, I believe that having the same accent as everyone in your community is a good thing! In the past immigrants came to America and their children assimilated, they would speak the language of the old country at home and “American” outside the home, and then the next generation almost never learned more than the food or the religion of home country, rejecting the place that their grandparents freely left and embracing the new world, this creates unity, this creates community. The family members who pine for the old country, the old ways, do a real disservice to their new home and to their children, losing the accent is the best way to embrace the new community and is core to the American experience, we all did it. I really hate it when on NPR the reporters use a foreign accent for a Latin name, but not for any other foreign names, what the heck is that all about? Treat everyone the same. Suffering for the next generation is the immigrant experience, embrace the new and reject the old-that’s America.
3
Matthew Rhys, of the Americans show, has a natural Welsh accent. Lovely. My own accent is a mixture of Liverpool, Australia and London. Accents -authentic, often multi-levelled- are great! But, you do have to draw a line somewhere. Just watching a French police series, based in SW France (Pyrenees), where many people speak with an Occitan accent. It has been dubbed into American-accented English. Absurd and very off-putting because it corrodes the local cultural associations. (Would you like to watch The Wire in Oxford English?)
I turned this off. Keep it to French.
Accents are adorable! Poor English ain’t.
8
Yes! Thank you, Mr. Agudo. "Accent" is completely subjective. All we need to do is LISTEN!!! It's actually quite easy.
2
In my 20's and 30's, I thought it would be fun to attain enough proficiency in several languages to conceal my origin as an American. I achieved this in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and German. I would give people (in Europe and South America), who asked where I was from, three - even five - guesses, and they would never guess "American".
It ocurred many many times, at the end of the exercise, a light bulb would come on in their eyes and they would triumphantly (and sometimes in a "knowing" accusatory whisper) declare that I must be "a Jew". As it happens, I'm not Jewish, but there is so much to unpack in that answer and the way it was delivered. Let's just say the stereotype of the cunning, state-less yet thoroughly infiltrated into society Jew is, unfortunately, alive and well.
2
Yes, let's abandon grammar and correct pronunciation. How about doing away with English classes altogether?
How boring would the world be if we all spoke the same language with the same accent!? I feel very much at home in a large city, airport or university with all diverse languages swirling around me. I respect anyone trying to learn a foreign language, especially when they have not many around them speaking their native tongue. It is exhausting and frustrating, you don’t quite have the vocabulary of the new language and you start to lose the vocabulary of your native tongue. Been there, done that! I moved over to Germany in 1990, to Würzburg to be with my then boyfriend/now husband. Between the Frankish/Bavarian accents, no one speaking much English, and my boyfriend only speaking german to me to get my “ear” for the language, I did succeed. The US was built on the hard work, blood, sweat and tears of immigrants. We need to go back to being accepting of diversity!
3
Yes, equally, everyone has an accent but "some accents are more equal than others." A person's accent usually (not always) reveals a great deal about them. So I really don't understand Mr. Agudo's point- of course everyone has an accent. But that doesn't mean everyone is equal "speech-wise." In fact, much the opposite.
3
In the future, we shall all be up-speaking, creaky-voiced ducks.
To paraphrase
An language is just a dialect (or accent!) with an army.
1
Amen to almost everything you wrote, but I can point out one minor exception to the idea that a nonnative accent provokes a negative stereotype (ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, whatever.)
In the US, a British accent clearly marks the speaker as 'nonnative' to here, but also typically attracts a presumption of education, intelligence, and competence. (Heck, even a gecko with a Cockney accent has been market-tested to get a positive reaction in the US!) I'm sure there are other examples of places where certain nonnative accents are similarly respected.
1
I know of one person who speaks English without an accent. That would be Queen Elizabeth. It's her English. All of the rest of us have an accent.
8
Actually, the upper class British dialect dates only from the 19th century. American English is more traditional.
4
Chicagoans and Michigans of all stripes most certainly do have accents.
1
Bostonians, too.
1
Here we have a perfect example of fake news, I mean fake opinion. Having traveled widely across my native South, I can state with authority that there are many people who do not speak with an accent. Those who speak like me.
1
"An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him.
The moment he speaks he makes some other Englishman despise him."
---Alan Jay Lerner by way of G.B. Shaw
3
Johnson: In the world of voice-recognition, not all accents are equal
You make an excellent point. Nonnative accent was not an issue till Trumpites have made it so, even when the FLOTUS has such a deep one. The hypocrisy of it all.
4
FLOTUS speaks english like she just got off the boat. The fact that Trump lives with this in his own house whilst rounding up hispanic children and locking them up in cages is the height of hypocrisy. Not to mention that his first wife wasn't exactly a perfect english speaker herself. Maybe Trump just loves Eastern Europeans and former Soviet bloc countries more than he does Central and South Americans. That he hates Mexicans and Muslims is a given.
4
As with everything, there must be a "zero" point. In the US, it's supposedly in South Dakota.
As a Southerner, I have found that when talking with people from other parts of the country that as soon as I start speaking the listener assumes I am uneducated and racist. Add female to that and the prejudice increases.
3
Love my Maryland accent..oooo.
My input:
-The Irish speak the best English, great accent with depth of understanding of words.
-However speak like the Queen, very clear and non pretencious
-Etonians, have the a unique accent which will get you places.
-Americans in general speak a clear and workable English
-Take your vocab from the NYT and the Economist mag.
-Avoid Australian accent and regional English accents.
Yes, everyone has an accent. And that's okay.
It's okay, too, to write with somewhat of an ESL syntax. When an Italian writes a sentence as though literally translating from his Italian thoughts, it's charming.
But let's please draw the line on Spanglish, Ebonics, and the like. Most jobs in the United States require a command of English. That goes for automobile mechanics, who need to read instruction booklets, for electricians, for plumbers -- as well as for those "white-collar" workers: lawyers, physicians, and the like.
When native English speakers reach eleventh grade and cannot form a coherent sentence, and educators fully expect them to go to CUNY, they -- and we -- are in trouble. And no wishful thinking can make it otherwise.
6
As a Southerner, and an educated one at that, this is not news to me. People with the most obnoxious of northern accents have made jokes to my face about my accent, only to have their own jaws drop when I point out to them that they speak like Archie Bunker. What?! Not I! I speak with the accent of God Himself!
I've noticed that people from the Upper Midwest are the worst for this. Iowans tend to be caught completely off guard at the idea that they have any accent at all. Seriously?
We do have biases. But we also have RP -- Received Pronunciation -- and Daniel Jones's "cardinal vowels." That is, we establish standards and then judge how closely people hew to them. We also have dialects and patois and formal and informal speech.
The problem, with language as with race, is not in the variation but in the ranking.
The author of this article is right in saying that accents can be a cause for prejudice, and a detractor to meaningful conversations. I have an accent, but I have never let it define me. I came to this country 61 years ago, and speak English with several accents mixed up (British, American, and Canadian.) However, my vocabulary is vast and bookish. This throws some people off because they expect you to speak the way other less educated persons do. I attended good universities and even got a PhD. I got good jobs and made a darn good living. This article fails to acknowledge that the problem with accents is not just the person who speaks with an accent, but the uninitiated person who is listening to 'accented' speech. I have noticed that children always "understand" people with accents. They are in the stages of accepting all, normal and variations of normal speech. I have never had a child labeling my accent as "funny". However, for non sophisticated listeners and rude people, an accent is a frustrating experience or a cause for further conversation . They want to "investigate" what that distracting, "cute, little accent" is; kind of a guessing game. These people annoy me to no end, so I tell them to go ahead and guess. Of late, I have come up with a better response to their curiosity: "It is not an accent, it is a speech impediment." That shuts them up; they didn't mean to hurt my feelings, so they apologize. "Tomatoe, tomato?"
3
Any accent spoken with a genuine smile should be admired. It is only the snooty or ignorant who would think otherwise.
3
An accent which attests to one's identity is one thing. Upspeak is quite another. It is just an annoying habit or affectation, similar to the overuse of LIKE or Y'KNOW. What happened to plain old declarative sentences? And, contrary to what many believe, it is common among males as well as females.
1
As a trucker I travel the 48 contiguous states. Many years ago, in a Southern bar, I ordered a beer and then headed for the men's room.
The drunk at the bar followed me there, and we were standing beside each other at the urinals.
He looked over menacingly and slurred, "Y'all talk fuhnny". I, more amused than angered replied, "I talk funny?"
Interesting article but the author seems to mix up "accents" and "speaking English better than Americans". The former is simply the pronunciation of the words, the latter is the lexicon that the speaker chooses to utilize.
By the way, Puerto Rico is not a country but a part of the US.
4
It's hilarious to learn that some people believe an American accent is, in any way, a superior way to speak English.
2
But still the use of the language remains a marker of class. Referring to "Them guys" will kill a prospective employee's chances. An accent is one thing, standard grammar is a miust.
2
Nonsense! I don't have an accent...I grew up in Cincinnattuh!
3
Please? An old Cincinnati way of saying “I beg your pardon?”
1
Valley Girl 'upspeak' drives me crazy. It's creeping into NPR and even men are talking like it. What is up with this? Please stop!
10
Nonsense. The Queen's English is correct, the version you and I speak is not.
When I first moved to the South 40 years ago, after living my whole life in New York State, it didn't take me long to realize that the one with the accent was...me! To be understood, I had to learn to "lose" my Northern accent, to the point where people didn't know I wasn't from North Carolina. I learned there isn't such a thing as a "Southern" accent--saying "y'all" doesn't cut it--any more than there is a "Northern" accent. There are myriad shades of "accent" just in that one state, and that's different from the varieties in South Carolina, Georgia, etc.
Visiting Glasgow, I was shocked to learn that the Germanic-sounding Glaswegian is actually English. And, of course, in the UK, accent is a definable a characteristic as a football fan's scarf in team colors.
Language is a fluid evolving thing, evolving thousands of times faster than biology. In the comedy "Renaissance Man", Danny DeVito's character reads to his army students from Shakespeare and one recruit says "Could you translate that?"
DeVito replies "Why? It's in English!"
Every profession has its argot, whether it's scholarly or more physical. Carpenters, Electricians, Plumbers, HVAC, Roofers, Landscapers, stage hands, farmers and of course, the military ALL use their own argot. Plumbers install "commodes" and "lavatories" rather than toilets and sinks, for example. Much of this is to be both precise and concise--fewest words to convey an exact meaning.
Interlocking Slide Fastener--mil talk for a zipper!
5
As a child of 10 growing up in Graduate school housing at Columbia in 1968, I was treated to a large number of accents from just about every continent on earth. Later on in life I felt fortunate for the experience because in college I understood my Calculus professor from India - Prof. Varadarajan. I understood my housemate from Ghana - Mr. Bediaco. And I understood most everyone I met along the way. Even now at the age of 62 I can pretty much understand anybody. I am proud of that.
Many of my Calculus classmates complained about not understanding Prof. Varadarajan. Or maybe they just complained about the amount of homework...I think "judgement" on the part of my classmates may be getting in the way of understanding. Often times people misjudge a person with an accent as someone who is less than...less than perfect? So they tune out and end up dropping the class after the first week.
I am now living in Los Angeles and I am surrounded by accents. Some people say I have a slight accent. But I can't hear that accent they say I have even when I listen to a recording of my voice. I just tell them "I don't know what you're talking about".
2
I was a bit surprised by this column because it's self evident.
or maybe it isn't in the usa.
I believe that Australia, new Zealand and Canada all have more people, per capita, who were born outside those countries.
not sure of Britain.
Canada is different from the others since it has france as one of its two founding European cultures. somewhere around 20% of its citizens have French as a first language.
I lived in japan for a number of years and taught English conversation.
literally every Japanese I met both at the schools I taught at and in the outside world said Canadian English was the easiest for them to understand.
Scottish the hardest.
4
Percentage of foreign born in Australia is indeed much higher - 28% compared to about 14% for US, 13% for UK and 22% for Canada. But it’s worth noting that Brits and New Zealanders make up a large proportion of the total foreign born, nearly 30%, and there are significant populations from other countries where English is spoken as a first language or at near native levels - South Africa, India, Philippines, Ireland, Malaysia.
1
david,
g'day.
I think of oz and Canada in being similar in that there isn't a huge difference in accents in across the country.
I know the 'ocker' accent is supposed to be different, but i don't find it profoundly so.
of course, in Canada, i'm not talking about the French speakers who are mostly in Quebec.
when they speak French to natives of france, they're often hard to understand. the French, I've been to france two dozen times, usually find Quebecois accents hard to comprehend.
newfoundland, which sounds irish, is the english exception in Canada.
I've been to oz a few times tho only Melbourne. best friend is from box hill north and I had a girl friend from wagga wagga.
I often ask aussies of they have an egg nishna.
they usually say yes and I chuckle.
they ask why and I say we say 'air conditioner'.
I experienced similar prejudice as a child, in the 7th grade. To that point in my life, I had lived in Pittsburgh (where I was born), and Sydney, Australia. As a result, my accent was a mashup of Australian and Midwestern when my family moved yet again, this time to suburban Philadelphia.
I had a social studies teacher who constantly corrected my pronunciation, publicly, in front of the class. This caused me to stand out among my peers, at a time when girls are desperate to fit in, and was a source of significant stress for me.
All this was about an accent that while not local, was certainly common among native English-speakers. I can only imagine how much worse it could have been if my accent had been foreign.
3
I wish American Airlines telephone assistance system be more accent flexible. I, always, have to repeat my AAdvantage code like three times for the system to understand my accented English:(
There’s a country song, “Good Ole Boys Like Me,” with the following line: “I was smarter than most, so I could choose/ Learn to talk like the man on the 6 o’clock news.” In my case, I didn’t even have to learn to talk like him so long as I could write like him. I never made an effort to refine my accent, and it was sometimes advantageous to be initially underestimated on that account. And accent notwithstanding, nobody ever suggested to me that I didn’t belong in academia. One of the nicest things about white privilege is that you can enjoy it without even realizing that you have it.
4
All this is academic. In reality, CBS news anchors generally have "no accent", whereas Monty Python, Dolly Parton, or Jorge Ramos clearly have British, Southern, or Mexican accents. (Listening to a British accent make me cringe.)
Though both me and my wife were not born here, I am content that our children are culturally American and that they have no accent. This is more important to me than multilingualism. And if I could wave a magic wand to get rid of my own remaining accent I would not hesitate.
1
I am a white American who learned Spanish in Colombia. Though no Colombian has ever said I sounded Colombian, in other Spanish speaking countries, like Peru and Cuba, they assumed I was. It's all relative!
How often have I felt people look down on my accent using their would-be and so-called Parisian accent while making the most obvious grammatical mistakes. Linguistic snobbery.
2
That happened to me in New Orleans. I swear that I could not understand a singled word that the locals said. I ended up having to ask my husband to translate. He doesn't have a "Nawlins" accent but he does have a "Nawlins" ear.
1
So darn True!
As an ESL american, I certainly do have an accent when I speak english. I have been in the USA most of my life (now 60+ years old) but my accent is with me, always will be, and I'm proud to have it. this accent of mine gets even more pronounced if I'm angry or speak english too fast.
I'm also too aware of poor english skills in native americans. Can't stand the favorite of so many "I would like to thank ..."
ok, then why don't you just Thank? would is a conditional ... what stops you from outright thanking? "I want to Thank ..."
So sorry! don't mean to preach, but if you are going to pick on my pronunciation, you'd better use better language.
4
That English has long been no longer the tounge of a small island but a world symphony is a great compliment to that island's culture. But that great chorus creates its own anarchy. For example, how do you have rhymed, metered poetry anymore when British, Nigerian, Scot, Alabaman, Australian, Pakistani, Brooklyn and Oakland voices clash? I'm sure Spanish has similar world travelling issues. The thing is we live in language as much as language lives in us - and it's all alive! Mira!
After some years of marriage to an American and residing in the USA, I ventured down to my family in Australia. Some of them were aghast at the acquisition of an American accent.
2
A foreign will confuse a native speaker when the foreigner has not mastered some version of the English system of phonemes, and when she lacks fluency. That version might an American or British one, or Indian English, or even English as spoken by people with a German accent. What I mean is, the accent must have one-for-one versions of every sound and every distinction made in English. The sounds do not have to be exactly the same as a native dialect. A Japanese speaker may pronounce an "R" somewhat more like the Japanese R, but as long as she also pronounces "L" with a distinct difference and with the tongue touching the top front teeth, her accent will be understandable.
Problems arise when the foreigner does not make distinctions we make in English, such as L and R, or the two versions of "th" (which are spelled the same, making them difficult for a foreign learner). Or, when the foreigner pronounces what should be the same phoneme in two or more different ways. For example, an Italian who pronounces "excess" as "ek-ses" sometimes and "ek-chess" at other times.
A native speaker of English can quickly adjust to an unusual set of sounds as long as they fit the phonemic pattern. When they do not, the native has to continually translate the words in his mind, repeating sentences back the way you do when you hear someone shouting at a distance in a strong wind. After a while this becomes exhausting and you lose track of what the person is saying.
I bet to differ- it is a well known fact that natives of the MSP metro area are the only English speakers with no accent.
Pilots seem to have that backwoods West Virginia drawl of Chuck Yeager. Sportscasters for decades sounded like Vin Scully. The best are imitated sometimes with hilarious results.
1
Accents, at least in America, are like clothes, and the Standard, unaccented Midwestern "accent" [heard on the nightly national TV news, or NPR] is a well-tailored business suit.
A sub-HS educated Brooklyn or Bronx accent is a well-worn unmatched sweatsuit w/ hoodie and gaudy gold chain necklace.
An Oxford educated British accent is a conservative and subtle shaded Tux.
No -all accents are not "equal". They bespeak class, education, wealth and social status.
But GOOD NEWS- they can be changed and improved.
2
Your regrettable clothing analogy perfectly illustrates the view the writer challenges in the article. Beyond that, it reveals assumptions about class ("good" English wears a suit or a tux) while "bad" English is decked out in hoodies and gold chains. This well-spoken Jersey girl with small hair does not even want to begin unpacking that one. . .
In a job interview in Raleigh, the interviewer , with a southern accent, asked me how receptive jurors were to my “ Northern accent.” I am a lawyer admitted in both NY and NC. I answered that I heard as many as sixty new residents were coming in to Raleigh a day. He became agitated and responded, that’s right, hardly anyone here is from Raleigh anymore. I took great offense, I wanted to tell him that I did not have a “Northern accent.” No sir, I have rather pronounced Bronx accent. The nerve of him to not know or even recognize the difference. How obtuse or shall I say, bless his heart, I work in Durham.
3
What? People believe there is a single authentic accent and are taken seriously? I thought this was in the realm of flat earth societies. I understand what people mean when they say a single authentic accent, but what they really are talking about is their native region's accent. People who don't realize they are talking about their native accent are blind to their own obvious self-centered view. It's like writing an E on your forehead for someone else to read. Some people can do it, some people can't.
1
This article is completely American-centric. Why not look to other languages for comparisons? German and Italian have whole dialects that are incomprehensible to non-speakers, plus a universal form of the language that everyone with an education is supposed to be able to switch into in order to surmount dialect. Meanwhile French basically has two forms - the correct form and low-class debased forms. So it can be the case that a particular “accent” is first among equals, or even acknowledged to be superior.
4
English is the language of the United States of America. Citizenship requirements used to include the ability to answer questions in English. This was the common denominator of the "Great Melting Pot" which was the basis for the goal - success.
Everyone may have had an accent, but that accent was in regard to English and the effort to have common communication was appreciated.
6
What is the difference between accent and mispronunciation? The fact that there is no "single true and authentic way to speak," that there is a range of possibilities that count as correct, doesn't mean that there is no difference between correct and incorrect.
A tenor would be laughed off the stage if, not rolling the "R" but enunciating it American style, he sang "Nessun DAWRRR-ma."
Someone who wants to "aks" you a question is communicating that they lack a certain basic competence in detecting or reproducing the order of consonants in a word.
Contrary to what some other commenters say, communication is not the only criterion.
It’s rare, but some multilingual people are able to speak many languages with fluency and in the local accent. My European father spoke seven languages. His English was highly accented; most
Americans found him difficult to understand. That’s why I was tasked with calling for appliance repairs starting when I was eight. But his childhood friend Akiva, who spoke as many languages, sounded like a native born American. When in London, he sounded like an Oxford graduate. In Israel, everyone thought he had grown up speaking Hebrew. Yes, he had many accents, but most listeners thought he was “one of us”.
You are exactly right, in my location I have no accent but a thousand miles away, well, I’m a character from Fargo. Alabama accents are almost incomprehensible to people in my area, yet they are also native English speakers, no less intelligent or facile with language. This diversity of speaking is positive as it makes our communication and our lives far more interesting.
3
Saying people speak with an "accent" is no different than referring to someone who is dark-skinned as a "person of color." We all are "people of color" - some of us have a darker color than others - but I don't hear anyone complaining about the use of that phrase. When people say that someone has an "accent", they simply mean that he/she speaks the local language in a manner that is different than most of the people in the particular community and that the person's "accent" suggests that he/she is new to the area. But usually after a while the newcomer with the "accent" loses the "accent" and speaks like a long term resident. This happened with my cousin who was born and raised in New Yawk, moved to South Africa after she got married and now speaks English with a distinct South African "accent." So if you're trying to get people to stop referring to others as speaking with an "accent" fuggedaboutit!
3
This article states the obvious with an air off superiority. Of course there are accents and there are high status accents and low status accents. There are accents that show you aren't a native speaker. And there are accents that make the speaker hard to understand-- accents and forms of speaking that clearly aren't English. Someone once told me i speak English with French words; that isn't accent, although I'm sure my French accent is bad. There is no use pretending a poor accent, improper sentence formation and resulting incomprehensibility are ok. They aren't.
1
A native speaker in America would speak American Indian language, and that would be very few of us indeed. What I find most disconcerting about our English speaking Americans is their belief that when they travel to foreign countries, the countries they are traveling in should speak English to them. Americans feel very little obligation to even try to speak or learn a few words of their host county's language. How much more enriching their experience would be if they only learned a few words of another language.
It is too bad that our Education system in this country feels no obligation to have us learn a second language from Kindergarten on. It would enrich our living right here in America because we are such a diverse country, no matter what some people think. Plus the younger we are the easier it is to learn most anything, including another language.
I also think it is too bad the Public Education system in this country does not adopt the Maria Montessori manner of learning as the best learning model for our children. Montessori's methods help develop the whole child, not just the mind but the spirit as well.
This would go a long way in teaching acceptance of all kinds of accents.
7
I don't have a talent for foreign languages, much to my undying shame. When I hear visitors in the US struggle with English, I am always impressed at their efforts, knowing that they also speak at least one other language. I love how different language speakers pronounce our crazy words that have few rules or reason and the few rules of pronunciation are usually broken. I presume that had foreign languages been introduced to me very early on it would have made a difference. I cannot trill and when my toddler was able to, having been taught Spanish by her preschool teacher, I was thrilled. I continued to have her work on her Spanish and then was "betrayed" by an upper-middle class school district that decided to cut out elementary school Spanish. We tried to supplement it but it withered away. As a college student, she has taken language but I fear that it isn't "natural" for her as it is for one of her friends who is now multi-lingual. Alas, our education system enforces our English "superiority" while losing the best opportunity to make the world a better place.
13
It works both ways. While seeking voiceover work I developed a "standard" "TV" accent. On Staten Island I stopped a couple of cops to ask about neighborhoods. As the one very helpfully was describing the pros and cons, the other had a broad persistent grin. I finally asked him what was so funny and he replied "Oh, you tawk funny!" I could only agree.
7
A good study would be one which asks whether people intolerant of other people's accents are also more likely to be intolerant of an original thought. It seems intuitive to conclude that if you want people to all have the same language to point of same accent you also want them to hew to a strict line of thinking.
On the other hand, it seems absurd to defend differences in language to point of different accents or even belief in necessity of multiplicity of language without also being prepared to embrace original thoughts, thoughts likely to conflict with one's religious, political, economic leanings. I don't think any major political party today really likes differences in accent in language let alone multiplicity of language let alone original thought. The world seems closing in to standardization of language and war between major political/economic movements.
3
Although a native speaker of American English, I never really understood its grammatical structure and syntax until I was forced to take second-year Latin in college. We read texts from classical Latin, a highly inflected language in which changes in word endings and shifts in vowels carried most of the information about mood (e.g., subjunctive), gender, number. case, tense, etc. In classical Latin, one can see the elegance and simplicity of languages in which the word sequence in sentences is relatively unimportant to understanding the meaning of the sentences, in contrast to English. Cicero, Virgil, et al. could place a given word nearly anywhere in a sentence, which allowed them to write poetry that scanned perfectly.
10
I'm glad that Mr. Agudo recognized that certain ways of speaking can present difficulties for ESL students (and thereby also some native speakers with certain accents). The distinctions may be arbitrary to linguists but they are not to grammarians or English teachers. The problem is that speaking is spelling. So is reading, and vice versa. If you are not speaking with some reasonable competency, then you will not be able to decode the phonemes properly. That will also inhibit reading competency: effectively, learning to read and spell comes down to brute force memorization. This can doom such disadvantaged students to a permanent second class status. (Don't they have enough to overcome already?) Earlier groups of immigrants emphasized speaking proper English, which sped their rise in American society and life. We don't want to stigmatize any groups of Americans, but the way we speak does have consequences.
3
Sometimes I think many Americans don't even realize the unintelligible speakers they are conversing with on question/complaint lines have never been near this country. The have been taught specific scripts from which they cannot deviate. They have had little if any opportunity to increase their facility or practice nuances of accent. You might not be able to understand them, but their companies don't much care as long as they can pay them a fraction of what they would have to pay a native speaker.
I admire their work ethic and just wish they were better trained and compensated.
6
When I landed in the USA in 1964 I was determined to speak English so well that no one could even bother to ask where I was from. But then I thought, it was late 60’s, diversity was great and it was more than enough for me that a friend of the family, a professor of lit at the U. of Chicago, declared that my English was better than that of most Americans. I knew then that I had achieved what I had been aiming at, full integration with divers roots.
1
My parents and I immigrated from French Switzerland when they were 28 and I was six. None of us spoke a word of English. My parents quickly learned a beautiful, perfectly grammatical English, but of course never lost their French accent. That accent was the delight of everyone they met; I was sorry when I lost my French accent. Immigrants I have known who spoke with a German or Scandinavian accent tell the same story. I'm afraid there is quite an element of racism and class bias in our attitudes toward accented English. We love the lilt of a Spanish or Indian accent, but only from those who have achieved an approved level of education or socioeconomic class. Once again, race and class emerge as the crucial, and mostly ignored, determinants of "successful" integration into American life.
9
When I moved from the East Coast to Chicago 44 years ago, I often heard "You're not from around here, are you?" or "You're from the East Coast, aren't you?" Some, when I said I grew up in NJ, would respond, "Oh, Joisey, huh?" even though my accent sounded nothing like that particular part of NJ (or Brooklyn). NJ has several including an odd way (to my ear) of saying the 'o' in certain words (Rome, home) in folks who hail from around Camden.
I have not had anyone remark on my 'accent' in decades, so I guess I must sound more local than I used to, so folks can change over time.
I studied several languages in school, but never excelled in the spoken variety of any. Additionally, I spent several months in Cairo about 20 years ago trying to get along, buy groceries, navigate public transit etc., with only a smattering of Arabic phrases. I currently tutor ESL students in English. It is extremely hard to learn a new language as an adult - even when motivated by necessity. Most who succeed will likely learn only functional English (i.e., never be able to express complex ideas or feelings in Eng). Even that is quite an accomplishment.
2
Raised in Queens and still living near NYC, I suppose I do have a noticeable accent. My observation is as an adult i have made more neutral, though others have told me when I'm very tired or under stress the accent comes out very strongly.
Chicago accent...love it. That "Midwest" sound actually starts a little west of Albany, NY, ind gets more pronounced as you go west. Peaks I would say around Chicago then persists to Minneapolis, and then fades. I have always found it very soothing.
People say learning a language as n adult is hard. I am 54 now and will start my fourth year of learning German...German School of Connecticut...while I won't say it's easy, it's easier than learning Spanish....which I promptly forgot...when I was in high school. I think, being older I understand the process of language better. I'm also willing to make mistakes, it's how I learn. I will never have the skill of a Muttersprachler, but I'm getting to the brink of competency and find myself liking it. I've been to Germany and Austria a few times now, and even my limited skill makes the experience much more enjoyable.
1
I moved to Norway from the States over 30 years ago and had to learn Norwegian in order to get a job in a technical field (I have a chemistry degree). It was hard work learning a new language as an adult, but definitely worth the effort, especially learning jokes, humor, sarcasm not the least. It is the best way to integrate into society and learn the culture etc.
I write, read and speak my adopted country’s very well now, but I will never really get rid of my american accent. My written english has also suffered!
People have asked me if I’m from England, Argentina, Italy....no! I switch over to my nondescript midwestern and they realize immediately where I am from!!
Thank you, Mr. Agudo, for your thoughtful and accurate essay. As an ESL teacher, specializing in 'accent reduction', the first day of my class I tell my students that everyone has an accent and that I despise using the term for the exact reasons you detail.
4
I left New York when I was a young man. I went many places, did lotsa things. The number of times my accent was pointed out to me over the past thirty years is astonishing. I came to realize that growing up in the New York metro area with all its diversity provided me with a great inheritance- acceptance of others.
2
I live part-time in Manila. English is widely spoken there but because it is most people's second language, there is a small minority who speak it poorly & have difficulty being understood. It is for these that "accent reduction" would be a real benefit.
Alas, Sr, Agudo's contribution is a triumph of ideology and political correctness over the linguistic facts. Native speakers in any country that has regional, social or gender variation (namely, all countries) are keenly aware of the variety of native accents (and vocabularies, and grammars) and how they all differ from non-native ones. What they do with such knowledge is another matter, but to deny their subtle knowledge and pretend linguists don't know about it is to deny well-known facts of everyday life. TG
3
I'm occasionally told I have no accent, to which I reply, I have a coastal urban American accent.
That said, I picked up from my British mother, who died when I was young, British pronunciations of certain words: con-TRO-versy, to-MAH-to, etc.
Then there are other words that I seem to pronounce like no one else, for which my kids give me lots of loving grief.
I find some accents more pleasing to my ear than others, especially many Indian and Caribbean accents (Apu's is a favorite). And what must be an unusual exception, given the lack of positive stereotypes for this way of speaking, I love most Appalachian accents.
But I don't think of any accent as a variant from a standard, unaccented form of English. Rather, they're just a piece of who we are, and where and with whom we grew up.
I am reminded of my first year living outside the US when I told two Australians how much I loved their accents. They looked at each other and said in unison, "Accent? You're the one with the accent, mate." Accents, like skin color, dress, accessories, religious articles, etc., are to many people shibboleths, passwords, a way to decide if a person can be accepted as belonging to one's own tribe. Having lived outside the US for over twenty years now, I realize that I have much more in common with people who sound and look much different than I do than I have with many of my own kin who have never left home.
4
As a native of Germany who learned British English as a third language, I am far too often asked by native born Americans and complete strangers who overhear me speak:"Where are you from", followed by "I love your accent".
The funniest example was by an American college student who was waiting tables in a restaurant. She asked my German born adult son and me while talking English to my American husband if we were British. My son thanked her for the compliment, but said we are not. Her follow up was that then we must be English.
Indeed, everyone has an accent. But the constant refrain of "where are you from" is unique to Americans and after almost three decades living here it most certainly gets on my nerves.
4
I’ve always had a big problem when non-fiction television shows that feature protagonists speaking a language other than English feel they have to dub them with an actor with the accent appropriate to how that language sounds to native English speakers. It’s absurd because the person is speaking pretty much without an accent to those in his or her language group. Somehow television producers believe that the accented English is more authentic in documentary films.
2
As a Bostonian, I am aware that my accent is more pronounced when I’m around family and certain friends, and less so when in the company of colleagues and unfamiliars. The time of day, how tired I am, and if I’ve enjoyed a cocktail or two can be factors as well. There are times when even I hear it and cringe. Ha, Ha!
11
I like when I encounter people who have accents to my ears. It means we have different experiences, and they might just be able to entertain me with stories about where they grew up or whatever. Some times when I listen to people, books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, and places to which I’d love to travel appear before me. I’m sure that sometimes I assign virtues and dignity that is undeserved. It’s not always scorn these days. The world is changing in some ways for the better. I’ve found that asking questions is always welcomed.
8
Standard American English is no accent and, to most, is correct.
The best sounding English is Italian New York which has grown rare. It was English spoken by first generation Italian Americans born and raised in nyc.
I both love and am embarrassed by my blue collar white New Yorker accent. Another accent that is dying off.
6
Thanks for the interesting article.
When I was studying Spanish in college I had a lovely professor from Barcelona and I worked evenings in a restaurant practicing my new language skills with the fellow who washed dishes. One memorable afternoon my teacher and I met in her office and she expressed, with some concern, her worries about my accent. She told me that while my grammar and vocabulary were progressing nicely she was puzzled that I had somehow acquired the accent of an "illiterate Puerto Rican," her words, not mine.
Nearly 40 years later, living in Madrid and married to a Colombian, my accent is still a mess but I take pleasure in that fact. It's the result of my own personal history.
16
When you are talking about Caribbean Spanish and Peninsular Spanish, you are really talking about different dialects, rather than different accents. A linguist would say that the term dialect, used by a linguist, is a technical term, and reflects differences in language between communities and is used without value judgement: something your language teacher obviously did not do. Caribbean Spanish was more strongly influenced by Andalusian Spanish and is sometimes referred to as a "radical variant" or "radical dialect," while the Spanish spoken in tierras altas (highlands) of the Americas (Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia) is sometimes referred to as the "conservative variant" or "conservative dialect," and was more strongly influenced by the more Castilian(though the lisped "s" never took hold in the Americas). Your teacher was probably reacting to the radical dialect tendency to "swallow vowels".
1
When someone is speaking to me in English with a very heavy foreign accent, I just remember myself in Reims trying to find a laundromat and the *very* patient policewoman who helped me out when I asked her using my best French, which I had learned 20 years previously. I then try to be like that policewoman.
BTW - I leaned that day that the French word for "laundromat" is «lavamatique».
10
I agree that speaking with a different accent shouldn't be stigmatized--but people all over the world, in every nation, make fun of the way other people speak. Some white English speakers are mocked for their supposedly 'nasal' quality. Which I admit I can sometimes hear in my own voice.
It's fine to prefer one accent to another, just as it is to prefer one given style of music over another. Preferences are not evil. Trying to impose your preferences forcibly on others is another matter.
And for the record, I always liked Apu.
My grandparents were Irish, and I rolled my eyes at the way Irish accents are done by Non-Irish actors (badly). But I didn't see it as an attack on my heritage.
We can enjoy the differences in our speech, the same way we enjoy other differences. That's the key to real multi-culturalism. Not ignoring the differences, but celebrating them.
Granted, it's a fine line between a friendly joke and an unfriendly one, but let's be real--it's a human quality to find other modes of speech funny. It's going to happen whether we openly approve of it or not.
And my accent, whatever it is, is just as fair game as anyone else's.
10
Back in the 1969s a comedian named Bill Dana made a whole career posing as Latino immigrant "Jose Jimenez." I suppose there have been others since, although in this age of political correctness, Dana would have to change his act. I have also heard Chinese comics who specialize in mimicking the accents of Chinese speakers of other dialects (which, if I can figure out what they are saying, is sometimes quite funny).
My point being, I know what it's like to have struggled with mastering a foreign language and the effort and study that goes into it. Our English grammar is fairly easy but spelling isn't logical (why is there an "s" in "island"?) and learning idioms by rote requires a lot of extra work. I admire people who have made the effort to learn my language and am more than willing to listen patiently to what they have to say.
6
...and that character grew out of the punchline of one joke.....how polite americans were at the ball game, where they sang "Jose can you see".
Midwestern dialects are often described as "standard American," but they had to come from somewhere. Dialects moved westward with settlers. Clearly, these did not come from New England, New York, or the South where people do not pronounce their final "R"s. The area on the east coast where this is still practiced is around Philadelphia and adjacent parts of New Jersey. Along with our government, it would seem Philadelphia gave birth to our language and has retained it to a large degree. Of course, one can encounter "urbanisms," especially in the immigrant neighborhoods, but the suburbs are largely free of these.
New Yorkers are surprising unfamiliar with my Delaware Valley-Philadelphia dialect even though one encounters it south of Sandy Hook. I have even been asked what is my original country. I do admit to avoiding the signature word, water ("wooder"). Some feel that this dialect is a remnant of late 17th century English that has largely even vanished in the UK---a phonetic fossil.
7
Yes, but many of these once very pronounced regional differences are fading, since our national broadcast media are the same whether one lives in Roxbury, MA, Houston, Minneapolis or San Francisco.
If I start speaking to someone who is " a local" where I currently live, I always get the same look. It is a non verbal 'you ain't from here' .
3
This article has all the wistful naïveté as hippies in the ‘60s— trying to convince everyone that clothing shouldn’t dictate what you think of someone. It shouldn’t, but it does and always will. We humans are always looking to sort and categorize the world around us and yes, in that process, we make judgment calls. And why stop at accents? I’ve been treated differently all my adult life because I speak in a “cultured” voice and use a large vocabulary. (I’m a middle class Midwesterner.) It wasn’t deliberate, my parents were both teachers and it just happened. But because I speak with a grammatical correctness it is now fashionable to loathe, many people peg me as high brow which I am decidedly not.
9
A fascinating article; thanks to Professor Agudo and to the NYT for publishing it. I'm a first-generation American with parents who immigrated from Central and South America, (from Honduras and Colombia, respectively). As professionals working in STEM fields, they spoke English fluently, idiomatically, and with accents. Note that I use the plural here because, of course, their English accents were different since they came from different Spanish-speaking countries and thus, also spoke Spanish with different accents. Growing up in New Jersey -- in the northern part of the state that was once horse country -- my siblings and I were bilingual, speaking English with the standard MidAtlantic accent then (and now) favored by many broadcasters, and speaking Spanish with our American accents. To my father, who had an excellent ear for langues and who prized his Colombian-accented Spanish, hearing us speak with Spanish with American accents was grating. He drilled us on Spanish tongue-twisters in the hope of having us trill our R's more authentically. Though I never achieved that goal, I'm grateful that my parents gave me the gift of appreciating the subtleties and intricacies of language, the beauty and intrigue of accents, and the extraordinary verve and determination that immigrants wield in enriching our country.
13
As a general rule, the influence of the 1st language does not impact the 2nd language as long as the learner has been exposed to both languages before the age of 9. This language influence is what we perceive as accent. Children have the advantage here in becoming true bilinguals (it also helps if they are brought up biculturally). This is what we were taught in my graduate program in Speech and Language.
2
My mother, before her retirement was a teacher of elocution. She worked on clear, precise communication with her students. This included working on lisps and stammers, mumbling, intonation and the theory of public speaking. She did NOT work on accent.
As an interviewer for positions I have benefited from others disparaging views on accent and have hired talented people with accents that would lose them a role elsewhere. Accents from poorer areas often make people think that the speaker is less able and that seems to me to be close to the opposite of the truth.
11
Like everything else accents say something about you. Mostly they just point to where you grew up or where you live. But like clothing, we can adopt them to make a point of who were are.
We wouldn't have teen slang, up-ticks, urban slang, the rhythm that puts an "um, like" into speech, if people didn't choose to identify with a group through language. Generally clothing goes along with the package.
So like most other cultural identifiers, accents are both neutral - they just tell us that the person we are speaking to speaks English better than we will ever speak Mandarin or Hindi or Spanish or are from Tennessee not Staten island- and loaded. They can also tell us about people who balk at conforming to the white middle class conformity, balk at conforming to middle class educational standards.
The key of course, as in everything else, is to hold off on the judgement, until you know the person.
6
I come from Southwest Michigan, along the shore of Lake Michigan, and have what has been called, a very clean American English "accent". It is the language that you will hear on national TV, from sportscasters to news anchors. Any derivation from that speech in a national broadcaster is noted.
Bostonian's have an accent - as American as it is - as do New Englander's, as do Texans and Oklahoman's and Georgians. But not Chicagoan's or West Michiganders.
Clear, crisp and sort of nondescript, that's our language
and our contribution to American language.
2
In my experience, the people who struggle to learn a language (especially as older adults) are low literacy in their first language. They may be smart and have many useful skills, but a language is a very complex system.
A different alphabet can be another stumbling block.Think of yourself moving to, say, Korea, as an adult. Learning basics words and phrases is one thing, but to go to the doctor, say, or work on a legal matter, one would really be better off with an interpreter.
2
I'm sure that southerners think we have a northern accent!
1
I live in a city with no standard accent (well, I'm not in on it) and three languages I hear daily. It makes communication interesting.
Because everyone is aware that communication is difficult due to accent, word choice, culture and first language, we all work at it.
2
I spend most of my time in Latin America these days. I’ll never forget the time I was walking down the street in Mexico City a few years And suddenly realized that while all my life I had heard people with strong accents in the United States now I was the one with the strong accent. Very amusing.
3
While living in the Netherlands, I used to watch BBC2. Often I had to turn on the subtitles in order to make sense of what was said. Clearly the english language has disconnected from the lingua franca, which english has become. And we non-native speakers will modify it until the natives all have an accent most of us cannot understand. Go to any international science conference and if you are a native speaker you better think how to give your talk or you’re the one not understood. Our program of deconstructing the english language is moving well now, with a president of the USA who cannot formulate a complete sentence coherently.
14
Noontime feel bad. I am from the same place as our president, though a generation younger. I too am baffled by his poor language skills.
My grandparents, who taught history and English grammar in NYC high schools lied to me. They said "you will never get anywhere if you can't write a coherent sentence in English." Sadly, in my life our president as well as numerous senior executives I have encountered lack reasonable language skills in their native language. Yet they ascend to senior levels of government and business???? In a language other than English....fugeddaboudit
When I travel in Italy I am sometimes told that I speak Italian with a German accent, which is odd, since I was born and raised in the U.S. and learned my Italian from Americans. A friend suggested that perhaps they assume that I can’t be American because I speak serviceable (not great) Italian, and my fair hair and complexion suggest Northern Europe.
4
I was raised in the midwest in a middle class African American household. Many of the blacks in our city of Kalamazoo, Michigan were recent or first generation migrants from the south. By middle school my midwestern milieu had instilled in me certain biases that were in active operation even if I wasn’t conscious of why I thought this way or that. One such bias was that the accent of my black schoolmates was inferior to my own. Once I heard a southern, Black accent i assumes the speaker was not as bright as I and in some other ways socially or personally errant. It was not until I was a full adult and living on the east coast in a Latino neighborhood that I gained a distant outsider’s perspective to look back at my old self and community that I realized my cultural bias and that my thinking was the problem not my former southern Black neighbors. Surely my biases were not isolated and without doubt determined that black south to the north migrants were and likely still are withheld everything from descent housing to dating outside their race and class.
12
I hate to sound like Ebeneezer Scrooge here, but I hope someone can help me (not unkindly, please) to understand why it is that some people come to the United States to live and then refuse to learn the English language, or at least a working facsimile thereof. I can understand, if you are new to us, needing some accommodation until you can find your way. But people that have lived here for literally years, and still need an interpreter??? Accents have never bothered me - I think they are charming and show, at least, that the speaker is trying - but the stark refusal of some to even try to get along in their new country’s language has always bothered me a bit. If someone can help me to understand, I would appreciate it and could then adjust my thinking. I see this issue on a fairly regular basis, as I work in the social services, and we are required to have a sign prominently posted with our basic mission statement, translated into no less than 17 different languages. As I said, I “get it” for those who are new to the U.S., but when we are still calling in an interpreter after many years of using our services, it just seems like people could try to make the effort to adapt to their new country. I would not move to France and expect that kind of help - I would learn the language!
59
Perhaps it's the promise of individual liberty the U.S. offers and (despite the current xenophobic climate) our general belief that we are, in fact, a melting pot of all nations, not an ethno-linguistic monoculture to which they must conform.
2
I now live in the small country that hopefully will triumph in the World Cup tonight. Locals will typically ask me where I’m from because my command of their language is heavily-accented but it’s the Aussies here who inquire about my English-language accent. I usually tell them it’s “Valley Girl”.
1
@Harry, Thank you for a well thought comment. This makes me think I am surely showing my age, as when I was growing up (and dinosaurs still roamed the earth!), until I was about 10 I was never exposed to anyone but native English speakers. Then we moved to Florida, where I learned Spanish. Then we moved to Hawaii, and that was certainly an education to this white girl! For the first time, I was the minority, and it truly was a melting pot of different languages and cultures there. I found it wonderful, and maybe we are moving closer to being a “melting pot” here on the mainland than I ever realized.
2
I think that everyone should be humble and realise that indeed everyone has an "accent".
That said, there is a range of accents that are considered to be standard English in the US, and others in the UK. Anyone not speaking in one of those accents (whether because they are foreign born or grew up speaking a regional accent) will find themselves disadvantaged in communicating with their fellow citizens for the rest of their lives. The same applies in practically every language in the world - it isn't just a US or UK thing.
If you want your child to have as many opportunities as possible you will ensure that she can speak with a standard accent. (This isn't my rule, its just life.) She can and should keep her original accent as well. The Swiss have mastered this. They do not expect any foreigner to speak to them in Swiss German, and they all read, write and speak in standard German when dealing with non-Swiss persons.
5
o. German. when I worked in France I had a German-Swiss co-worker. we spoke English because we couldn't understand each other. we often had a good laugh,too, about it.
obviously, we both learned French.
4
I had to pick up Italian after the age of 30 when I moved to Bologna from Boston with Italian husband and infant in tow to reset up life. While my accent has been praised as not too exaggeratedly American, I still have complexes about it, as there is no way an adult’s English speaking mouth can be retrained to perfectly mock Italian vowels, trills and double consonants. When need arises, I am quickly forgiven when I tell people I have the “Stanlio e Ollio” accent -- that’s the way Laurel and Hardy are dubbed in Italian, very effectively and hilariously. That puts everybody at ease, which isn’t too hard for Italians, bless them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyGCjUXZv-4
Then again, when you are anglo accented here, that’s indication that you speak the language that everyone else feels they must master in order to be successful, and have quite a time of doing so, so it almost gives you a status that another accent wouldn’t. Mmm.
7
This is a strange article with a muddled point. Of course there is no such thing as having "no accent" in the literal sense; the author understands (and admits, about halfway through the article) that the phrase "no accent" in American English is simply the idiomatic expression for not having a non-native accent or a distinctly regional accent. The author belabors this odd point in an apparent attempt to make us feel more empathy for people who speak English as a second language, and asks us to try to put away our prejudices about the way people speak, which is both impractical and impossible. He makes the preposterous point that an "accent is a shallow measure of language proficiency" when, in fact, it is an extremely good proxy for language proficiency, although clearly an imperfect one.
Instead of making the silly point that "everyone has an accent," the author might have explored more deeply the more interesting question of "how do we use accents to get what we want?" Accents can be changed, often with minimal training and effort. Would it really be great if we could "put aside our linguistic biases" more readily? Should I speak just as quickly and with the same vocabulary to the taxi driver with totally incomprehensible English as I do to my mother? Not if I actually want to get where I'm going. Accents, while occasionally misleading, more often communicate a lot of relevant information!
16
1) Vocabulary is not the same thing as accent. 2) If accent could be changed so easily, people would not have accents and there would be no need for this column. 3) The point that accent is a shallow measure for proficiency is not "preposterous" at all. You have probably heard Shakespearean actors with very heavy BBC accents who were actually quite good at speaking English.
1
In emphasizing the problems posed for non-native English speakers in America, without a doubt a worthy topic excellently presented, Mr. Agudo has too easily slipped over the same issue as it arises in regional American accents and vocabulary which represent a richness and variety in our culture which is slowly dying due to prejudice and television.
I was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut and suburban Philadelphia, and have lived in Texas, western New York, northern New York, and now New Hampshire. My wife and I have, for most of the last twenty years, spent major time in the southeast as we follow the bluegrass music trail.
Regional language variations, along with food preferences and varying social and political attitudes provide a richness and a peril beyond measure. We should glory in them as we come to know each other better at the core. Maybe some of the misunderstandings would dissolve if we came to recognize the differences in tone and accent between, for instance, Avery County North Carolina and Raleigh/Durham.
6
Just saying "everyone has an accent" should not excuse language learners from doing their best to be understood by those who don't sound like them.
I speak two languages fluently (one is US English, my native tongue) and a couple others stumblingly (to be generous).
But when I travel outside this country I find native speakers - of any language I am stumbling through - to be generally very supportive and encouraging of my attempts to communicate in their language.
I don't believe this is only because I'm from the United States (though that is charming for some folks off the bat), nor because I'm a trained actor who communicates for a living (hopefully entertainingly - in what they taught us was a "Standard Mid-Atlantic" accent). Folks are gracious I think mostly because I am obviously trying very hard to get better at communicating smoothly and courteously in a new tongue.
People who behave impatiently or dismissively to others with a "foreign" or "learner" accent, are rude and unkind. BUT Those learners who don't make the effort to get better at a new language, who don't think to slow down on words they have trouble pronouncing clearly, who don't try to expand their own vocabulary to try a different tack when they are not being understood (like many, many customer service phone reps I've dealt with)... are ALSO being rude and unkind to their listeners who struggle to understand them.
We all have to make the effort to make communication happen between humans.
17
Just saying "everyone has an accent" should not excuse language learners from doing their best to be understood by those who don't sound like them.
I speak two languages fluently (one is US English, my native tongue) and a couple others stumblingly (to be generous).
But when I travel outside this country I find native speakers - of any language I am stumbling through - to be generally very supportive and encouraging of my attempts to communicate in their language.
I don't believe this is only because I'm from the United States (though that is charming for some folks off the bat), nor because I'm a professional actor who communicates for a living (hopefully entertainingly), but mostly just because I am obviously trying very hard to get better at communicating smoothly and courteously in a new tongue.
People who behave impatiently or dismissively to others with a "foreign" or "learner" accent, are rude and unkind. BUT Those learners who don't make the effort to get better at a new language, who don't think to slow down on words they have trouble pronouncing clearly, who don't try to expand their own vocabulary to try a different tack when they are not being understood (like many, many customer service phone reps I've dealt with)... are ALSO being rude and unkind to their listeners who struggle to understand them.
We all have to make the effort to make communication happen between humans.
6
I've lived in Australia for 15 years, and every day I get asked where I'm 'from'. I cheekily say the current suburb I live in, then will tell them USA, if they keep asking... I used to work for a beloved Aussie sport and was once told 'no one wants to learn about (that sport) from an American', which is hilarious, as I have a better understanding of the rules and appreciation of the game than most Aussies (including the person who made that comment). As a result, I never ask where someone with an obvious non-Aussie accent is from...
6
It could be worse. As a schoolboy in Australia I had an English accent, which allowed Aussies to call me, in the local venacular, a 'Pommie bastard'. Bigotry takes many forms besides race, class or colour.
1
As a member of an older generation, having grown up listening to Australian Broadcasting Corporation and British Broadcasting Corporation announcers, my accent is close to Received Pronunciation.
It's always amused me during our trips to the UK that my wife's Australian English accent is almost immediately recognised, while I get asked for confirmation that I am actually Australian.
I am often very tempted to come out with a Crocodile Dundee / Barry McKenzie 'Ocker' accent in response.
6
I remember our school teachers here in England refusing to contemplate French and German exchanges in sunny Provence or Bavaria, on the grounds that our resulting accents would make us sound "like peasants". Instead we were condemned to the rainy north in the interests of purer diction. Having said that, I'm not surprised that the author's Spanish students struggle in Barcelona - they speak Catalan not Castillian.
10
You made an interesting point. I’m Cuban born and so are my parents. However, my Grandparents were from Galicia & Barcelona.
While my first language is Spanish, my parents always made sure my brothers and I spoke proper Spanish. Something that I hold on to closely.
We never spoke Catalan as its not something used in Cuban. Its local dialect that serves little to no purpose outside of that region.
There are fundamental differences between Castilian & Catalan. However, I’m a separatist, but rather a man that prefers to celebrate and respect the dialects, accents, differences while we share our humanity.
Perhaps the person who wrote this article needs to expose himself to a place like NYC to better understand that accents is what makes life more interesting. Perhaps he has spent way to much time within the Academia Bubble.
Its time to take Boy out of the Bubble and teach the teacher that we must celebrate each other’s diversity.
2
Every one speaks Spanish in Barcelona, even if they choose to speak only catalán and be French about it.
3
As a New Yorker who has lived in Vienna for 36 years, I speak German fluently but my American accent is always perceptible. I sometimes notice Austrian interlocutors taking on English-sounding features in their speech while talking to me, in a kind of mirroring. I understand it to mean they like talking to me; the question "Where are you from?" -- served with a smile -- usually follows. But sometimes the person I am speaking to betrays a sense of irritation, as if listening to my American-accented speech required unwanted effort (I imagine I can see their brains working through extra cognitive processes while they listen). At such moments, I get a glimpse of what it feels like to be the (undesirable) "other". I am fully aware that my accent is considered a "good" foreign accent where I live -- speakers of languages with lower prestige surely feel this irritation directed towards them more frequently. Ironically, my work involves training university students to speak with an American accent. They seize the opportunity to sound more like a native speaker because they know they will gain more respect from their pupils in the language classroom. Intelligibility is our primary goal -- we want to overcome pronunciation pitfalls that interfere with understanding and limit "strain on the listener" -- that sense of irritation. I agree that "Everyone has an accent": After so many years speaking German, when I am in New York I invariably get asked: "Where are you from?" with a smile.
40
Great article. Thankyou. There is so much further to go in this, though. Accents are EVERYTHING! They are beyond just culturally different types of communication and pronunciation, they are quintessentially TRIBAL . My father, who hailed from rural N. Italy maintained that he could discern what village in his region someone was from by their accent. We’re talking villages less then three kilometers apart!! That’s sensational in its nuance. What’s also sensational is that different people perceive accents in different ways. A great many people in N. America can’t tell the difference between Australian, South African and British accents. That’s a scandal if you happen to have one of these three highly diversely sounding dialects. Another fantastic element of accents is how some people can flip from one accent to another by demand. My wife, who was born in India had one voice for her parents and another for her school friends. Fascinating and marvelous. Should be studied in elementary school. Accents are the basis of communication. They can cajole, excite, repel. They can warm or turn off. They can convey time, place, education, social standing, acceptance, happiness, anger...they are EVERYTHING or did I say that already.
12
This reminds me of my father (LES born and raised) who said his city college speech professor could pinpoint almost to the street where his students were from!
I've learned about 5 or 6 languages well, and can speak about 4 of them fluently. ( the hardest being the Scandinavian ones, and in particular Norwegian - which seems to have over a 100 dialects that are wildly different )
In me travels, and with all of the languages and dialects and different ways of speaking (loud, soft, exuberant and the like), the one constant is that people do want to communicate - they do want to interact and learn and connect.
If you slow down and try to speak (even the most basic terms with awful grammar and pronunciation) the language of the person you are trying to connect to, they become instant teachers and have much more patience.
You usually end up with an instant friend.
27
My wife who is Japanese speaks English with a French accent because she lived in Paris for 10 years. She often talks about her struggle returning to Japan to find work and being laughed at for speaking funny English. Japanese are obsessed with accents. To this day, I still find advertisements claiming to teach British-accented English. I don't know, call me a globalist, but as long as one can get their point across, who cares about an accent?
13
I remember a conversation with my mother- a Danish immigrant- telling me that there would be certain situations where I would need to ‘tone down’ my New England accent, for fear of sounding ‘too local’. As a person now getting older (mid forties), I know understand the situations she was referring to- where people assume too much just from how you speak.
3
I am continually baffled by people who correct my pronunciation of words when I pronounce them as they are written. I have talked with linguists about this and they tell me language begins with oral communication and the written language tries to copy the oral, but often does not. Correct pronunciation, the academic linguists tell me, is the way you pronounce a word, there is no correct or incorrect. So if you acquire most of your education by reading you will not pick up on the way words are commonly pronounced. In the biological sciences people in different universities pronounce different technical worlds differently (examples, prion, endocrine, mesenchymal). People from California seem to be the worst at correcting people on improper pronunciation even when their pronunciation is totally different than the written word. I understand we can all contribute this phenomena to the Battle of Hastings when the French and English language began to converge.
3
I believe you mean "attribute," not "contribute." And, although I was born in California, I was raised and now live in Utah.
1
Do you mean "attribute"?
1
Yes attribute, don't know if the mistake was mine or autocorrect. Thanks!
Be Clear! Yes. I love accents as long as I understand easily.
6
“I don’t have an accent, you have an accent.” Many people don’t realize that your assessment of an accent depends on what you are used to.
However, while there is no such thing as a neutral accent, there are indeed standard accents, and these will vary depending on where you are. Also, we can change our accents, either temporarily (mimics) or permanently over time (think Charlize Theron). If you are not easily understood in the place you live and work, then you should try to work on it.
Note that the level of success of adaptation will depend on a number of factors, some of them outside people’s control, so we should not pick on people, but should help them be comprehensible. Remember also that, the more we speak and listen to someone with a strong accent, the more our ears (brains) will tune into that accent, so don’t exclude those whom you find difficult to understand. Persevere and both your hearing and their speaking will improve.
4
Accent is also a part of language. We discriminate meanings by it. And one of the characteristics of language is being cultural. People understand and agree with one's meaning because it is greeted by one community. So is there any reason to accept many other accent? It is not need to be perfect but need to be similiar with native accent.
2
My undergrad degree was in Theatre Arts. Most trained actors learn the International Phonemic Alphabet, which replaces vowels and some consonants with symbols denoting the proper pronunciation. While it is a great talent to be able to perform a script with a dialect different from one's own, it is not to be confused with the ability to speak another language
2
Because I was born in the suburbs of Washington DC, I speak what is often called "standard English." I see no reason to be ashamed of this, but it's rather silly to refer to my accent as "proper English", or to say that I don't have an accent at all. The reason my accent is considered "proper English" is that this is the way people speak who historically have had the most economic and political power in this country. That's it. It is no more eloquent or precise than any other way of speaking English.
I also remember the Monty Pythons talking in my accent, and doing it very badly. It was the first time I was able to hear my accent as an accent. It was much funnier than when they learned how to do the accent properly.
4
I grew up in Memphis but my “standard” accent was shaped by my Yankee parents who were also actors. My school friends often queried why I had an “English accent.” Intriguingly, my friends with German or Japanese parents wound up with a full Mid-South drawl (which is significantly different from a Virginia or Georgia dialect). Another friend whose parents were also Yankee actors wound up speaking full-on Southern. So why do we stick with a dialect or shed it? It’s a fascinating question that surely goes beyond class to allegiances.
8
Heard at the grocery store a few years ago - a recent and first time visitor to Vancouver enthusing over his trip there and saying they "all had British accents"up there.
I do notice some Scotticisms when we're in BC.
Thank you for pointing out this rather obvious fact. I'm always baffled by the ridiculous comments I hear such as "I wish I had an accent" often from people speaking in the broadest New Jersey or Bostonian twangs.
In our small family we have California accents, a Scottish accent, an Indian accent and a French-Israeli accent in which the earlier French accent dominates.
We are all American citizens but we have our own little United Nations.
5
The outer-borough dialect of our current president, a native of byoodyfull New Yawk, amply demonstrates that the traditional "Middle Atlantic" pronunciation is no longer required to achieve material nor political success. Nonetheless, it's probably better for would-be public speakers to acquire it, because it is widely understood
3
I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. It was said that American standard English, or whatever it's called, could be heard in northeastern Ohio or in Seattle, Washington, and that natives of both were sought after as radio announcers.
I like to listen to accents and try to determine the speaker's origin. Fred Rogers was a classic Pittsburgher (well, from Latrobe,) Frank Sinatra was New Jersey, and I suppose Richard Nixon was California.
4
‘Native” Californians who speak English as their first language are not, for the most part, considered to have a regional accent. I attribute that to television and, to a lesser extent, to Hollywood. Over time we became the “neutral setting” for US English.
However, there are regional accents here in the Golden State. One that has always puzzled me is the Old San Francisco twang, which shares some similarities with a New York accent. It’s dying out, but you can still hear it among some of the old “born-and-raised” San Franciscans. What is the origin?
5
I’m from NJ and noticed the California accent on a fishing boat to the Farallon Islands outside SF. Though I’d certainly heard Californians before, I had time to listen carefully. Though I can’t say it was a SF accent I noticed it surely wasn’t NJ!
1
Yes, we all have accents. In England, there is Queen's English, free of regional pronunciation. In the US, according to Vincent Price and Orson Wells, it is the Midwestern accent. But something is definitely wrong with the speech of a country, where most of the Presidents elected since 1950 spoke with a regional or ethnic accent.
3
Not everyone in England speaks Queens English. Just going from one end of London to the other, you will notice a remarkable difference. Then lets go to the Midlands etc.etc. It all just boils down to the fact that we all have accents.
1
Such an important subject! As a southern with a heavy TN dialect I am accustomed to the "hillbilly" label. I was once told by my boss in NYC I could not present to the board. Instead a British person would present. My boss in all honesty told me it had nothing to do with ability only the perception that anyone speaking with a British accent is perceived better! Listen to Bloomberg TV, the analyst for NYC are all British accents! We do stereotype based on accents.
34
Guilty.
I’m from western Washington State. I feel terrible saying this, but after years of fighting a gigantic bank about a mortgage issue, I now hang up on telephone banking operators with an “accent” of any kind until
I get someone who sounds like me. Too much has been lost in translation in the past with operators I felt I couldn’t fully understand. I’m glad I read this article. It makes me really stop and think about how harmful this practice can be in most situations.
4
Dear Professor Agudo, I do hope you weighed in on another recent NY Times piece - "Will a Southern Drawl Close Doors for My Son?" Talk about discrimination based on how your sound. You are right - when people are listening more to how you say things - rather than what your saying....we then have a huge problem - especially in a country with distinct regional dialects and newcomers from all over the world.
Accents have been used to discriminate in Britain for ages. It separates the classes and identifies exactly where one comes from.My cousins in Northampton have an entirely different set of pronunciations as relatives from further north. Even here in New York City there are various accents. Anderson Cooper has a upper class “Manhattan “accent, as did the late Jackie Kennedy . My husbands slight Brooklyn accent is different than what I heard growing up in the Bronx. I , on the other hand, have a problem. My parents were Scottish and I seemed to acquire a unnatural mix, which results in people thinking I’m either from Boston, or some other “exotic “ land. My twin sister, who grew up with all the same sounds, doesn’t have much of an accent at all. I used to be accused of affecting my speech, but then I heard of something called a “mimics”ear. I realized that when I was with my Scottish relatives, I began to have a slight burr, with my cousins from the Buffalo, N.Y. area, a flatter pronunciation of some words. I know what it’s like to not be understood. Over the years I’ve had to repeat and slow my speech at times , especially on phone calls. So, yes, everyone has an accent. I hope we always do, it’s what makes us unique, but I do prefer the “Queens English “, it really is the loveliest sound. My second is the lovely soft burr of the highlanders.
14
You not that your sister doesn’t have much of an accent which suggests that you missed the point of the article. Of course your sister has an accent, likely one that sounds more similar to the area you grew up in than yours does.
1
I remember when the Beatles' first songs came out, especially "She Loves You," and those "Yeah yeah yeahs" sounded exactly like ours in St. Louis--flat and squawky. I thought, wow, I love these guys, and then I saw "A Hard Day's Night" and I could hardly understand a word they said. So even the Beatles took on other culture's accents when they were learning music from the musicians they loved and writing and singing their own compositions. Accents place you, get other people to listen, tell us that it's good to get around (round you git around, I git around...)
10
It was once said during the 1960s that there were more accents between London's center and London's outer suburbs than between L.A. and New York City. Wonder if that's true today, or even true then.
7
Great point made by this article. Seems to me that whenever someone mentions somebody else's accent, they are really referring to the "otherness" of that person. In this day and age, that tends to have negative connotations unfortunately.
If we look closely, we'll see that we're all different and the way we speak is a differentiator. Also, if we look closely, we can see we're basically the same.
23
This brings to mind an experience from my first job after graduating from university in the mid-80's, I worked in Canada for a company supplying components to a customer located in Texas; we often had conference calls and they occasionally came for site visits (pre-Skype, obviously). They by and large had Southern USA accents (Texas drawl). I, having only had exposure to that accent through film and television, where people speaking like that were generally portrayed as rubes, found myself speaking extra-slowly and avoiding big words. Worked out OK, and in fact some of them were very highly trained engineers, but definitely feel shame for having preconceived notions like that. Was a very valuable lesson to not judge a book by it's cover!
14
Some people have more trouble with foreign languages and accents than others do. I have no idea why. I had a neighbor many years ago when I lived in St Louis. He arrived in the US at age 19, from Hungary, speaking not one word of English. Somehow, he managed to graduate from college 5 years later, and when on to obtain a PhD. He is a world renowned structural engineer.
Does he sound like a male Zaza Gabor? No! In fact, he has no "accent" at all! I have no idea how he did this other than he is a brilliant man and was very highly motivated. A lovely man as well...
6
Some people have an ear for languages, others don't. My children are bi-lingual but my daughter speaks perfect Hungarian (the Budapest variety) and perfect Long Island English (my native variety). My son does not. He has a Hungarian accent when he speaks English. I also have students that barely have an accent and others who struggle to make themselves understood. I find those who can carry a tune better can more easily master the accent. (But this does not mean they are more or less capable of learning the language itself!) Also, if a person's native tongue is closer to English, that person will have an easier time. Hungarian, by the way, is very distant from English not only in terms of grammar but in terms of sounds. Hungarian speakers often cannot distinguish between certain "a" and "e" sounds or "v" and "w" ("west", "vest" and "vast" sound the same to many Hungarians). All these factors affect how one can master pronunciation. So you neighbor is a rare talent. Congratulations to him!
9
Wow, isn't this the truth. Several years ago, we were traveling in the UK. We stayed overnight in a B&B hotel in Edinburgh. In the morning we were having breakfast when another couple sat down at our table. The man spoke to us in a strong US, southern accent. I asked where in the US he was from, thinking he would know I was Canadian. Wrong! He told me he thought I was British. So, as comfortable as we all are, it is just as the writer stated.
3
Of course everyone has an accent. Accents make my world go round. I used to think I was (American) accentless but if I heard my voice after a few drinks it was almost you-betcha Fargo.
8
Just because I am a native US English speaker doesn't mean that I don't have an accent.
A Noo Yawk accent outside the NYC tri-state region is often seen as pushy and obnoxious. Even 40 years away from it (because I left NYC when I was a teenager and Western NYS when I was a very young adult) wasn't enough for it to disappear.
It's a strange week when I don't hear either a question or a comment from someone here who does not know me after they hear me speak. And I am a graduate school educated (two engineering degrees from UW) but when I talk, people think I'm less intelligent even though I speak at a good pace and enunciate my words.
So I gave up when I hear the comments. I tell them which neighborhood in Brooklyn I'm from and change the topic.
Personally, if you don't rush when you speak and you enunciate your words, that's good enough for me, no matter where or when you learned English.
10
Yes, everyone has an accent. I have known this for decades, having lived and worked in various places in the US and abroad. And now English is many people's second language. "Normal" is an illusion. One interesting experience I had was translating between a Thai person and a Hong Kong person, everyone speaking English. And one guy I couldn't understand at all was an Australian.
5
I disagree. I’m an American born and raised, and moved to Germany as an exchange student at 18. I learned fluent and, according to many, many Germans I’ve spoken to over the years, accent-free German. I’ve had many conversations with Germans in German, who had mo idea I was a foreigner. In Germany, it’s widely accepted that the area near Hannover is where the purest German (Hochdeutsch, or high German) is spoken, and everywhere else has an accent. There is such a thing as language without an accent for sure. That’s how we can distinguish accents.
2
Wrong, sorry. High German is an accent of the German language. Just like in America, people have an American accent. Even though proper English comes from England, English people still agree they have an English Accent. No one person or group owns specific, determined pronunciation of a particular word or phrase, so therefore everyone has an accent.
18
The language without accent you refer to is just another accent, neither better nor worse than others, just the traditional accent of the elite.
You may be part of those very lucky human beings who do not lose the ability to hear the sounds produced in foreign languages as they grow older. In twenty years of career as an EFL teacher, I only met one student who had that very special skill. Yet, when I told him how lucky he was, he disagreed. He explained that while doing an internship abroad, he was faced with disbelief when he told people he had trouble understanding them because he was a foreigner. Whenever I am tempted to bemoan my accent, I think about that student.
I think we should aim at being understood, not at getting a standard accent. Intolerance towards accents very often is a form of social and/or racial opression. We should learn to like accents, they make life colorful, and in a democratic society, there should be no Queen's accent.
16
Because I was born in the suburbs of Washington DC, I speak what is often called "standard English." I see no reason to be ashamed of this, but it's rather silly to refer to my accent as "proper English", or to say that I don't have an accent at all. The reason my accent is considered "proper English" is that this is the way people speak who historically have had the most economic and political power in this country. That's it. It is no more eloquent or precise than any other way of speaking English.
I also remember the Monty Pythons talking in my accent, and doing it very badly. It was the first time I was able to hear my accent as an accent. It was much funnier than when they learned how to do the accent properly.
2
The Queen of Accents par excellence is Meryl Streep with her incredible range of pronunciation in different languages. She has an exceptional gift. For the rest of us mastering another accent is often an unattainable feat. Americans as opposed to Europeans do not begin to study foreign languages until middle or high school (if at all). Often the emphasis isn't on speaking, not to mention the mastery of accents. Younger children are much more likely to learn another language with a proper accent; they aren't concerned with mastering grammatical structures or even the written word; they simply imitate what they hear naturally. A perfect example are children who grow up in bilingual homes and speak both languages fluently without accents.
Learning a foreign language when one is older without an accent is not impossible if you were to live in a place where no one else spoke your language and you were completely immersed in hearing the patterns of the local accent. It would help that while in that place, you fell in love with a native speaker to help you along.
As the author maintains, we all have accents. As long as we understand what each of us is trying to say to one other, the beauty of communicating should be more important than the perfect pronunciation of what we are saying.
9
On TV5Monde, the worldwide French language station, many of the shows will have english subtitles (US version). Occasionally a show will have French subtitles. When that happens, it almost always turns out the show was made in Canada. Canadian French is very hard for the people in France to understand, so it is subtitled in French for non-Canadians to understand.
It's a bit like going to Scotland. Whatever it is they're speaking, it doesn't sound anything like English. Especially the cab drivers!
7
I remember when Andrea Blain joined Minnesota Public Radio Classical (my go-to station since the demise of classical programming on the CBC here) at the end of 2014, while most of the comments were positive, one sourpuss complained about her "weird accent". She was born in MN but had spent 30+ years in Ireland, so it's not surprising that she had absorbed some of the speech that surrounded her. I notice that her Irish accent has faded quite a bit since returning to MN, though.
BTW, although I am Canadian, I notice little "accent" in most pf the MPR hosts.
3
No, sorry, but I did elocution lessons in England as a boy, and believe there's only one correct way to speak English (and if you have an American accent, I'm afraid it's not yours). Curiously enough, even though I don't speak other languages, I can also tell when a native speaker is speaking his language without an accent. It is mostly to do with good diction and clear and unambiguous vowel sounds.
6
The key word here is "believe," Joe. You believe there's only one correct way to speak English, but it's just your belief. Others believe differently, and who's to tell them they're wrong? Just because you invested long hours learning something doesn't make it objectively true. And as for unambiguous vowel sounds, good luck with that in the English language. I've taught English as a Foreign Language for many years, and it's the English vowel system that makes me think they should choose some other language as today's lingua franca. The differences between but, bought, bot, bat, boat, boot, or between can and can't in ordinary conversation, are extremely subtle, and very hard for learners to distinguish, much less reproduce. Spanish vowel sounds, on the other hand, are pretty unambiguous.
51
So you speak perfectly in the Oxford or Cambridge accent?
2
I don’t know about Spanish, but in Italy there are a whole panoply of vowel differences, consonant variations etc that a mark the speaker where they go. My American accented Italian come with an overlay of vowels and aspirated consonants I picked up at my first Italian home in Florence and from my Chiantigiano partner and now with the nasally vowels of Milan. I have decided that I am charming.
If more Americans would speak outside our native language more often, it would broaden and sharpen our understanding of what is best about being human. Admittedly, some accents are more difficult to understand than others, while others are positively delightful. One of my favorite language/accent combinations is French spoken with a Spanish accent. The locutions are as bubbly and chaotic, and as clear, as a fast moving mountain stream.
5
Indeed, accents are a fascinating attribute of humans.
I, being from the northern MidWest, have never felt to have had an accent, since much of what we speak here is close to the radio and TV announcers from across the country.
On the other hand, trying to understand what some southern drawls are saying is very hard, and it is akin to not hearing diction properly.
I often wonder if two from the same area communicate with 100% accuracy as do my fellows here in the MidWest? Or is there are much repeating back and forth as there is between myself and those with a stereotypical deep drawl, Texas Twang, or such? It seems odd, since when I speak, they seem to have understanding on the first utterance, or perhaps they've listened to a lot of TV and radio, too.
My nephew entered the Air Force right after graduating high school, and was on many different bases for much of his whole career. What became obvious after several years that he spoke 'military' which was not necessarily an affected accent (as is shown by many old dames transplanted from Texas and wish to hold onto their roots), but something that fits in no matter who he is stationed with at the time. There is no specific region, but just 'military' in nature.
Another friend could be in a city for a few hours and almost immediately adapt and speak the local flavor, and hit even the odd words on the money. He says he wasn't aware he was doing it, but it certain talent in avoiding being label a tourist.
2
I suspect that, to the ears of someone from the South, you would have strong Northern (Yankee?) accent. English speakers from outside of North America would identify a clear American accent, and might not be able to distinguish it from the Southern accent you mention.
The funny thing is that, while Phillip and Elizabeth affected "standard" American accents, those two actors' Russian accents were unintelligibly bad.
This was most noticeable when Elizabeth went to Mexico for a meeting. I think she said one word in Russian, and then the script writers left her out of the rest of conversation.
For a show that did so many things so well (right down to the 1980s placemats on the kitchen table in the first few seasons), it was a major disappointment to this Russian major that the main actors didn't make a serious attempt at a passable Russian accent.
3
Keep in mind that Matthew Rhys, who played Philip, is Welsh, so at least he was able to impress with his American accent.
Nothing wrong with a non-native accent. What I object to is when people are unintelligible. I work in an office where about 40-50% of the employees are foreign born. There are some people, whose pronunciation and word usage are so poor, they are not able to communicate effectively. I’m surprised they were hired. My company is headquartered in Europe and there are offices worldwide. I am in the US. The official language of the company is English and all employees are required to be proficient in both written and spoken English, but not all of them are able to demonstrate proficiency in English, it creates inefficiency when you have to repeatedly ask them for clarification.
26
Good position, well-stated. But am I to be shamed if my heart skips a beat when I hear Jessica Hansen reading National Public Radio's sponsor credits, in perfect American-accented diction?
4
The British have Received Pronunciation, which is basically Oxbridge English. We have standard pronunciation, which is what radio and television announcers are taught. Both are accents, and both tend to lead to success.
15
I’m also a linguist and this was such an interesting perspective. I grew up in the Midwest, USA, yet never had the twangy local accent. I’ve since lived in a few other countries and people can never place my “accent”. I am presumed to be Canadian, British, Australian, and I even got South African last week. I don’t think I sound like any of those, but I attribute this to the fact that I enunciate very clearly since I often speak with non-native English speakers. Along with that, I have also been told by many that I speak French “sans accent” and French speakers are usually very surprised to hear that I’m American.
3
Surely, a linguist knows better than most that "everyone has an accent" is not a perspective. Also, there is no such thing as "sans accent" in French. The French deride each other's accents as much as, if not more than, they deride other nationalities'. Of course, I didn't learn this until my French accent was such that my friends forgot I wasn't French.
1
Firstly, accent isn't pronunciation. Midwestern accents have a fairly distinctive nasal vowel sound that has nothing to do with pronunciation. Secondly, I've known several Midwesterners who have lost, or replaced, their natal accent due to relocations and/or education, which they could hardly do if they'd never had an accent in the first place.
4
My point was that I speak in such a way that people usually cannot pinpoint that I am American, much less where I am from within the US. Of course, being married to a French person, and becoming a French citizen myself, I’m very much aware that the French make fun of different accents (as do many other nationalities). When French people tell me that I don’t have an accent, they generally mean they can’t tell I am not French.
1
I went through a Hardee’s drive thru in Watumpka, Alabama once & did not understand a single word uttered by the young woman on the other end. Not.one.word. One would not have known we were both speaking English. While I felt bad, I’m not sure what I should’ve done about it. My nephew who grew up there (but has a Northern accent like his mother; she did not allow him to acquire an AL accent when he was learning to talk) had to interpret for me.
6
An excellent analysis and absolutely right. One need only recall the words of Professor Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady": " Her English is too good", he said, "That clearly indicates she is foreign, whereas others are instructed in their native language, English people aren't".
Having the 'perfect' accent is in itself a 'give away' because, as you very rightly said, everyone has an accent. The English and the Americans have never agreed on one, and even within the United States, the South, South West, Mid West and the North East accents would be as foreign to each other as would be 'Greek and Latin'.
11
"Language discrimination based on accent is not merely an academic idea. Experiments show that people tend to make negative stereotypical assumptions about speakers with a nonnative accent."
Okay --
My wife was born and raised in a Caribbean country which was part of the British Commonwealth and was under the Crown until their independence in the sixties --
She was educated under the British school system - including grammar --
I was born, raised and educated in the New York City area --
On more than one occasion - when my wife and I are having a discussion and I pronounce a word with my local accent - my wife likes to tell me -- "I speak English -- YOU speak 'Amurcan'" ...
18
Everyone has an accent is correct including my accent which very difficult for people to figure what I was saying. I begin to learn speak English when I was six years old in Peking. But I love to listen a southern lady's accent from the southeast of the US. When I watched Gone with Wind film during my elementary school years I really enjoyed listen to Vivian Leigh's British southern accent. It is charming, beautiful, sweet, and kind. Black American also have their distinguished accents too but are also representing their black culture and heretiage.
5
I love accents. I have been lucky enough to have lived all over world and states courtesy of the US Army. When conversing with a person and we both have the time I try to figure out where that person is from. More often than wrong than right when I ask if they are from "........". Usually the person will light up and begin to tell me about where they are from with a great deal of pride. If a person begins to apologize for their accent, I'll tell them to be proud of their accent.
17
I recently read a comment on a YouTube video about a support call. The video was praising the service, by the way. One popular comment was that the accent of the call center employee was "unprofessional." She had a mild black English accent, but was perfectly understandable. I was unable to even get the comment maker to see that this was racism.
We need to listen to each other, and respect each other, and see each other as humans trying to get by together in this world.
6
I get your point except I don't think this is an example of "racism".
Childhood in Saint Louis MO
Brief stays in Hawaii, Long Island, Atlanta, Laguna Beach, Brooklyn, Detroit, and Venice Beach, and Pago Pago Samoa.
60 years old; I’ve given up on the Taco Bell drive-thrus here in Indianapolis. There is a brief silence (perhaps to gather the crew around the speaker), and I am requested to repeat my order.
I've been in Indy since 1996.......
Have most of my teeth.
10
Nietzsche pointed out some time ago, it's about status and class. Whoever controls the "high-language" controls the culture.
This is not to say that grammar and usage are not important, which they are, but accent and diction have always been a means for the "upper-class", "elites", and "locals" to exclude.
Still true today--try a mountain West Virginia accent in Lenin's Bay Area sometime, especially while talking about Trump.
11
I taught an American summer study abroad course in Spain a while back. Several of the college students were from New World Spanish speaking countries, and Spanish was their native tongue. They had an interesting experience in Spain because several times, their Spanish pronunciation was "corrected". The students found this offensive, possibly racist, and we had a class discussion about the issue.
11
No doubt your students were corrected becuase in Spain they speak Castillian Spanish, whereas in Mexico and Latin America they speak what I call Mexican Spanish. One of the biggest differences in pronunciation can be found in the simple word "gracias". In Spain it is pronouced like "grathias", almost like a lisp. In Mexico/Latin America, it's "grassias", with the "c" sounding like an "s".
If you go to Spain and speak Spanish, as soon as you miss the lisp and say gracias with an "s", they know you are American. Conversely, if you're an American who learned Spanish from living in Spain, and you say "grathias" in Houston, they will laugh at you.
2
I grew up in South East OK. The accent there is somewhere between "Mississippi South" and "Texas". I went to college In Houston.
I never thought I had an accent until I left the South for the first time to attend graduate school at the U, of Illinois where I was also a teaching assistant.
After my first lecture a tall blonde woman came up to me and said "Mr. Sneed, what part a Texas ar y'all from?
As I grew older, moved around a bit and learned other languages my accent changed,
But still when speaking with others having the same "Mississippi South" and "Texas" accent I would revert to it.
Friends noted this when they heard me speaking to my mother over the phone.
8
Some foreign actors & actresses have an almost superhuman ability to speak another language w/o accent. Connie Nielsen (Danish) in American roles (e.g. 'Boss') has - to my ears - zero accent. In another pic she played a Southerner: perfect southern accent. And fluent in 5 or 6 languages. Joel Kinnaman (Swedish) in 'The Killing': no accent. Iben Hjelje (Danish) in an Irish movie w/ perfect brogue. Many other examples. I guess that's why they're in the acting profession.
7
great article.. being a irish american it is a surprise to many latin americans that i can speak spanish and portugese and when i travel in spanish speaking countries they are even more amazed!
sad that’s there so mych hostility in the US when someone speaks another language other then english.. to exist in this multi cultural world a second and even a third language is a major advantage economically and culturally..!
6
Learning a foreign language is time-consuming.
Mr. Agudo teaches Spanish and Portuguese to college students.
Spanish does not seem to have made its mind yet on what is standard Spanish, while Portuguese have gone the English-American way: Portuguese in Portugal and Africa, Brazilian in Brazil.
Most Spanish speakers, like Germans and Italians and I would say Americans and French-Canadians speakers, have to learn to speak what they don't like to call their dialects and the standard language. Not everyone is born in Burgos, Berlin, Rome, New England and Tours.
In other words, the article generalizes just too much.
3
Standard Spanish is what they speak in Spain. It's called Castillian Spanish. Standard French is Parisian French. Most of the people in France sound the same to an American ear, but they themselves can hear the regional differences. Canadian French is what they speak in Canada. Most French people have trouble understanding it. Ditto the Cajun French in South Louisiana. Standard British English is, I think, what they call "received pronunciation". Scottish English in unintelligible, unless you and they are both drunk.
1
English speakers, especially UK based, have perpetuated discrimination far ore harshly than any USA based speakers. Regional accents, in addition to Empire states are discriminated against. Some dialects, jus as facial features, are more appreciated and prized than others. So what. Simply live and immunize yourself against competitors. There is no other way. Your expertise is misplaced at best- a waste of time and effort at worst.
3
I wish I had written this piece myself because I have made this argument for decades. I'm situated as a US citizen, and within the US I am situated as having a regional dialect (sort of). So the idea of "native speaker" as being more "pure" is itself coded. I accept that there is no monolithic US accent. I think the language wars have eclipsed this argument, however: more often, I run into US citizens who cannot speak intelligible English regardless of accent. When I go to a nearby Chinatown and attempt to order in English, the servers cannot understand or respond to my English queries. I have to point to what I am ordering on the menu. When I visit the vet's office with my pet, the waiting customers are asked if "anyone speaks Spanish" because another customer cannot understand the vet who is trying to explain to her in English why her pet is sick. I am walking in the grocery store, and a well-to-do Asian woman is speaking to her son in what sounds like Korean. While I accept Derridean individual differences, I wonder if the outcome of these linguistic breakdowns is a splintered and fragmented union where the national center doesn't hold. What kind of nation is the United States if it linguistically fragmented? When I spent a summer in France, my primary goal was to learn the French language and culture, and I prioritized that goal: I reinvented myself. Reinvention is part of the American mythos. Why don't all immigrants to the US reinvent themselves by using English?
9
I, too, have reinvented myself in French after spending almost three months there doing intensive immersion classes near Nice. I have worked very, very hard to perfect a good to very good French accent, and have been mistaken for being French while traveling on trains and buses in France.
Like you, I totally do not understand why anyone would live in a country and not try to perfect the language and culture of that country. My goal when in France is to seem as French as possible, and as not-American as possible. In Spain, I try to use a Castillian accent with my Spanish, and in Sweden, I can say hello so well that I am usually greeted with a flood of Swedish to which I have no reply.
If I ever relocate to another country, I will try my very very best to fit in with the local language and culture. There is no point in living in a new country and keeping the old country always front and center. It's rude and gets you nowhere fast.
7
There’s a likely a big difference between living for a short time in France and learning French, which for English teachers is not as difficult as Chinese, and doing it in a program designed to take care of most students’ needs so they can focus on their studies. Imagine the extraordinary act of reinvention just emigrating to a country where you have to make a living, go to the doctor, send your kids to school, find work, a place to live, etc., all with new and confounding rules. Very few native speakers of English learn Chinese well, and it’s probably just as hard in the other direction, and likely harder for people without an education. Certainly they’re better off if they learn English, but most do. still, if they’re struggling to live they may not have time to. Even if they don’t learn English their children usually become English dominant. Reinvention is often a multi-generation project.
3
Wow. Perhaps avoid Chinatown if you are put off by the language. It’s good to see you became completely fluent in French over a summer.
I remember, with some shame, a time when I and my young, middle class cohorts would have some fun mocking the native accent of my beloved state of Vermont. It was synonymous with "redneck".
Now that the Vermont accent is somewhat endangered I miss it. I even cherish those few words I still pronounce with a Vermont accent, like "sorry" ( it's s/OHr/ry, not s/AHr/ry.)
In part this is because I identify now far more strongly with my state than with my country. I remember in the miniseries John Adams where the protagonist indignantly cries, "Massachusetts is my country, sir!" in a pre-USA context.
That's how I've been feeling for a while now.
16
Even for the most open-minded, accents can hinder communication. I grew up in Illinois and Iowa. On a family road trip, we stopped at a motel in Memphis. Another guest asked me where the “osperseen” was. I really wanted to help but had no idea what he wanted. After some good-natured shouting and pantomime, I figured out that he was looking for the ice machine. I worried that he didn’t understand my accent either, so I walked him to it. A good laugh for both of us, and an important lesson for a midwestern teenager. At age 63 living in Boston I’ve stepped in more than once to assist tourists from the heartland who had no idea what native Bostonians were saying.
33
Yes, when I was young I worked in a business establishment answering phones. One day I received a call from a woman who asked to speak to Bob. I told her we had no Bob working there and she got increasingly angry before hanging up. Turns out she wanted to speak to Barb, my co-worker.
The author champions an argument that one hears in every frosh Philo class in morality - cultural relativism means that every facet of human life is acceptable because there is naturally such a variety.
Well no - relativism posits the existence of the variety - it never legitimately makes the claim that all of them are equally valuable or proper.
Proper grammar, enunciation and elocution in all languages are the gold standard - and yes - some accents justly carry a whole load of cultural baggage with them.
35
Frosh Philo? It took a moment for me to unpack the meaning of this phrase, and its unfortunate use, given the writer's conclusion. There are many world readers of the NY Times unfamiliar with this regional use of US college terminology, and perhaps many local nationals unfamiliar with this localism, too. For this reason, I think one should be careful with what one ascribes as the gold standard. Context matters, and what denotes context lingusitcally better than an accent?
1
I was thinking this just last night over dinner with my husband when he told me a co-worker grew up in another country. I said how amazing that person is for learning english without an accent and then immediately said - no, he picked up an eastern corridor American accent.
1
I enjoy listening to accents even when I have difficulty understanding them. We watch a lot of tv programs produced in other countries. We keep the subtitles turned on for every show we watch, even those that are supposedly in English. Some British and Scottish accents are very difficult to understand.
36
I recall seeing the Jimmy Cliff movie "The Harder They Come" in the theater. It is set in Jamaica, and although the whole cast is speaking English, it had to be subtitled.
3
I was involved in a fairly heated debate with a friend of mine that was from CT too. We both lived in FL at the time and he kept saying "I get weird looks for not having an accent."
I kept trying to explain that his is one considered New England/Northern English speaking, or something along those lines, but that everyone had an accent. This was ten years ago. Now I can forward this onto him and heat this conversation up again!
3
I have lived here 35 years and still get asked where I am from when I say out or about. That Canadian accent still lingers.
10
Accents tend to stick when one has migrated post-puberty.
I can't help thinking that accents aren't the issue. Take contemporary movies …please. I grew up on movies with modest background music, if any, and stage trained voices. Diction ruled! Now, I can't hear what actors are saying for the emoting, the twitching lips and mumbling, whispering conspiratorially, in the sheer naturalism of voices with music at the same volume levels, obliterating need for well written scripts. So...
I like hearing accents and struggling to understand because that's what the world comes with. I can hear, but resent, the recent, tinny, nasal diction of TV News desk ladies, whose voices do not sound like womens' voices (more like the Chipmunks on 45 rpm), some adopted affectation to go with rapid fire talk. I can hear and follow Judy Woodruff. The tinny rest may be "standard," as is the
movie mumble with music, but I'll take a pass on that.
19
It sounds very much like you have age-related high frequency hearing loss, which can lead to difficulty picking out speech from background noise. And crankiness.
1
As a teenager I was told by some English speaking Europeans that I sounded like I was from New Joisey. They were correct, working class Joisey City, to be precise.
In college I learned that the phonograph was not called a steer-e-o, and caw-fee was not a caffeinated beverage. I spent those years trying to sound like the upper class New York accents of my college professors, until I found out that most of them were also from New Jersey or Long Island.
The accent changed and began to match the group I spoke with the most, but still to this day Jersey comes out when I am angry.
You can lead a haws to wawduh....
45
I'm from Jersey also, don't let anyone tell you that coffee is not pronounced caw-fee because it is and everyone else is wrong.
1
I'm not really sure what the point of the article is. One the one hand, the author is saying that "everyone has an accent" and we shouldn't worry too much about trying to sound like a native, since that is merely a "flawed ideal." On the other hand, you're acknowleding that people with a strong accent face difficulties in American society, which would suggest that it's important for people to minimize their accents if they hope to thrive in American society. The truth is that we DO have a standard accent in our country--just watch the news or any TV program. Non-native English speakers should be encouraged to learn it as perfectly as possible if they hope to be successful.
46
Sounding like the rich guys of fading now. Listen to Jaime Dimon, the head of one of the biggest banks in the US He sounds so New York and low class but that didn't stop him. There are many people like him in various fields. I taught ESL and found learning a new language varies among the students. Some pick it up very fast and others just can't get the sounds like and eventually they get frozen with that language but they speak English well and I suggest that English speakers put a bit of hard listening and don't correct and don't criticize.
4
Jamie Dimon was principally raised on the upper east side just like Anderson Cooper although think he moved there from Queens about 5. You’d need to be from NY to know that it’s not straight Queens that you are hearing, but an accent of someone who was raised in arojnr upper middle class Jewis. There are just certain signals that you pick up on in the accent and on the delivery of speech they are unmistakable. Steven Mnuchin also born and raised on fthe UES would recognize it from 100 miles away
2
The graphic illustration that goes with the article is beautiful!
I can appreciate the points you have made here. However, there are a couple of things to consider. Accents are only part of what a listener uses to form an opinion of the speaker. A speaker's good command of the language's vocabulary and grammar often (not always) counts as much or more than his accent in the criteria that the listener uses to form an opinion of the speaker. Accent creates the first impression, but as a conversation continues, what the speaker says often counts more than the accent with which he says it. That said, many people with "different" accents are sunk by that accent in brief conversational exchanges when the listener stops actively listening as soon as he hears an accent he doesn't like.
8
One of my son's, born in Virginia moved around quite a bit, so not sure what kind of accent he has, if any. But as he tells it, his Dad sure does.
He was on assignment to the Boston area filming a movie, ended up in Quincy just south of Boston where I was born and raised. Called home to Mom and said, Mom everyone here talks like Dad, it's unbelievable!
Quincy accents as I learned later are stronger than Boston, their "wicked" bad.
3
One of the best things my daughter did was have my grandson placed in a Spanish immersion program since he started kindergarten. Now, in 7th grade, after all of grace school taught in Spanish, he is taking French, and liking it. He was rump net up last year in his school’s spelling contest, which was done in English?
He’s the most himbe kid you’d ever want to meet. Why? Because he started all this when he was very young and knew no difference.
We need more school that offe these programs. We need more parents that take the leap. We need more and more ways to connect our world.
Who cares the accent? Let’s just communicate!
5
I like the accents/dialects of
Western North Carolina & Eastern Tennesse.
Eastern Tennessee.
Sadly these accents/dialects
are vanishing
into thin air.
8
I'm from Ky and love the accent but the mother of one of my best friends in high school was from NC and could listen to her talk all day.
5
Now if we could get the libs to stop discriminating against those of us with a southern accent the world might be righted. We're not KKK loving, confederate flag waving from our pick ups, uneducated buffoons many like to portray us as.
2
I have enjoyed reading your article/opinion about accents in speaking English. I have lived in the USA for almost 50 years. For years I had worried about my accent. Several years after coming to the USA, I heard a native American from Brooklyn speak. This guy's accent was very noticeable. So, after hearing his accented English, I started telling people who wanted to know where as was from, after hearing me speak, that I was from Brooklyn. When they questioned my answer, I would tell them that all people in Brooklyn have accents. I agree with the professor that access to education is very important.
Once a person can communicate effectively with others in their native language, his or her accent becomes irrelevant.
7
I remember moving to the Bay Area for work, and it took me a while to get used to the many ways people speak when English is their 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) language. But, I adapted after a few weeks, and it was no problem at all. And, I became a much better person when my friends were diverse and interesting. I believe this helped me to learn other languages more easily when we moved to other countries. It also helps if you truly listen to people when they are speaking.
I'm sure the college kids who are worth their salt will manage. Pilots and air traffic controllers the world over seem to figure it out just fine (even those snarky Newark ones!).
23
The author makes many good points. Everyone has an accent, and everyone speaks a dialect, defined as a particular variety of the language somewhere along the spectrum of all the variations that are considered a part of the overall language. Unless you don't speak, it's impossible not to have an accent and not to speak some dialect-- of English, Spanish, Japanese, or whatever you're speaking. It's true that accents and dialects are judged in different ways, but that's more about sociology than linguistics.
I work in the language department of a Mexican university, and oddly enough, I coordinate the Spanish as a Foreign Language program, even though I'm not a native speaker. I don't actually teach the classes myself; I leave that to the experts, and one of them tells her students (and me), "Don't worry too much about losing your native accent. That's what gives your Spanish its charm." It's good advice, because it puts learners at ease, which helps them a lot to master the foreign language. Of course, they have to work on their pronunciation in order to make themselves understood, but they're not stressing out over the probably impossible goal of speaking a Spanish that won't be recognized as foreign. Unless they start learning before puberty, that's unlikely to happen, but they can certainly learn enough to function competently, as people do all the time.
3
Thank you so much for writing this! A couple years ago, my nephew (12 at the time) mentioned that he met an Australian couple and commented on their accent. He then stated that he (speaking "without" an accent) found it difficult to understand them. I said "Of course you have an accent. You speak English with a Midwestern American accent. England (the birthplace of the English language) alone has over 40 distinct accents, so don't presume that you speak "correctly," while everyone else is different." I could almost see the gears turning in his head, and I think his entire worldview shifted in that aha moment.
It helps to be reminded often that our worldview is not some standard, to which all others should be compared.
98
Nonsense, there is a correct pronunciation of English aNd much of Australia violate that-I'm no condemning my friends from AUS but lets not be in dentils-they are simply not speaking correctly.
This is a really wonderful article. The main takeaway was clearly lost on many of the commenters, but as the daughter of Nicaraguan immigrants who learned English upon immigrating to Canada in their mid-20s, I appreciate your message on the harm of language discrimination and worthy reminder that we all have accents.
12
No we dont ALL have accents- sopencersville of us pronounce English correctly, and that is determined by what is in the dictionary.
Placing accents aside, being in possession of a second language can be a life-saver, and thinking of Adul the young Thai boy, who was able to communicate in English to the international rescue team.
98
There's a part of this that says, if you think you're speaking another language, that's good enough. Do you know how many college students complain that they can't understand lectures, especially ones in complex subjects, because of the lecturer's accent?
Do you know how often I've reached a customer service person I can't understand, and who assumes I'm an idiot because I ask them to repeat things slowly, or spell them?
Not all accents are great.
189
I don't think the author makes the argument that it is good enough to speak (or seemingly speak) another language. The obvious purpose of speaking any language is to communicate, and yes, any accent that hinders adequate communication is problematic.
I think the central idea of this piece is that one need's to listen beyond the accent and judge the speaker on the content of her or his speech. To that end, you should not feel bad about having to repeat yourself to a customer service agent, any more than they should if you have to ask them to repeat themselves.
6
So true about college students not understanding the instructor. This is especially true in math classes where the instructor will probably be an Asian grad student from Asia (ie, not necessarily an Asian-American who grew up here). For some reason there are very few US citizens who go to grad school in math, and yet it is the math grad students who teach all the 1st/2nd year math classes. They are supposed to take English pronunciation classes to make themselves understood to the undergrads before they start teaching, but the impact of those classes seems negligible.
5
You're exactly right. And the worst part is that these instructors or professors do not even care about the subject they teach or the students. They only care about their work visa to stay in the United States, not because of our values, but because of the money. Universities can get work visas very easily as a way to attract the most talented and bright from all over the world. But this privilege is being abused increasingly as a way to immigrate easily into this country and those hired are not the best or most talented at all. Many are hired by those who took advantage of the system and are in positions of power or by administrators who want submissive and compliant faculty. Unfortunately, the brightest and most talented of American citizens are displaced, given temporary or part-time positions and unemployed.
4
No they don't. Midwestern Americans have virtually no accent according to the dictionary. We pronounce words exactly as they are presented in the dictionary (well maybe not all of us if we didn't grow up in the Midwest). But I can assure you that my elementary school teachers made sure were pronounced words correctly. That means we have no accent.
10
I promise you that a heavy Midwestern accent (particularly in WI, my old stomping grounds) has a different pronunciation of words with -ou in them, such as about, out, and house, than the dictionary guidelines. I can't think of any reason why it matters, but to pretend it doesn't exist is incorrect.
33
My mom is originally from Kansas, and when she moved out East, she noticed some differences. She started hearing that vowels are pronounced more shortly in the Midwest, and also that some specific words are pronounced differently in her home state (for instance, "Washington" came out like "Warshington.").
Anyhow, there need not be any malice in distinguishing accents. It's just a way of acknowledging regional differences and that everyone sounds a bit distinct from another group.
2
I'm interested in how you came to believe that Midwestern Americans speak English "without" an accent when the language didn't even originate in the Midwest of the US, let alone in the Americas. If anything, the English should have the most legitimate claim on speaking "without" an accent (although they recognize dozens within their small country alone).
4
Yes, English has infinite accents. But some accents are considered more important and superior than others.
7
Not just English. French too.
People in Québec (with an accent, pun semi-intended) are often feeling a bit ashamed of theirs in front of their French cousins. For no reason. As the author said, linguistically speaking both are equivalent, and the ability of a language to spawn accents, new different words and the like is part of the geographical spread, environment and, shall we say, liveliness of the language too.
Of course different accents and use for words gives plenty of opportunities for unintended puns and jokes. What's not to like?
3
And some "accents"- really pronunciation- are correct and others are incorrect. These are facts, not prejudices.
Speaking of accents, I've always wondered whether it is possible for say, a Russian to identify someone speaking their tongue with a French accent or vise-versa. Because of the pervasiveness of American mass culture, and the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, it's usually easy for an American, of some modest exposure, to roughly determine someone's nationality based on their accent. Vaudeville, in fact, was full of acts parodying the accents of ethnic groups. Earlier in their careers, the Marx brothers all spoke in dialects, not just Chico. Other countries, being more insular would not have had this exposure. On the other hand, some habits die hard and Maurice Chevalier's exaggerated French inflections still serve as the comic model of a Frenchman here, although he flourished 70 years ago.
12
Russian speaker here. Yes, it’s definitely possible, and yes, some accents just sound funnier. Lots of Russian jokes are based on that.
3
There used to be a concept in England of "Queen's English," suggesting there was a norm for pronunciation.
But I can't think of many prominent English people who don't use "Queen's English." The Labour Party claims to represent the working class, but few of its leaders have working class accents.
Leadership is all in the accent.
7
A curious mind would like listening to various accents and enjoy the diversity of sounds, but a biased mind will notice discrimination. Remember, the studies also reflect a certain bias, particularly when someone else is paying for it.
10
Actually there is a correct way of speaking practically any language; clear and distinct enunciation, correct grammar, standard vocabulary. The dialectical forms of languages, especially inflected languages, tend to drop endings, making the meaning more context dependent, like English which is more difficult to learn for people with highly structured languages (Russian) than those with simpler forms. Not great English, but at least understandable in the American context. When the Russians eventually learn to use all the necessary prepositions and qualifiers that must substitute for the lack of clear noun cases and verb tenses, they speak a careful and quite good English. The exact accent is always going to be a function of early typing and neuromuscular control informed by Early imprinting of the sounds of "mother tongue".
A standard American language is the accent neutral "newscaster Midwestern" or central Californian, but Southern, Bostonian, Great Lakes, Texan, can all be understood easily if the speaker enunciates carefully.
In the UK the accents are legion. I have no trouble with Cockney, some trouble with York speak, more trouble with Highland or Glaswegian Scots. Very little trouble with any of the Anglo Irish except those of the West Coast of Ireland.
In France, I suggest the enunciation of the area around Tours. But the Parisian accent conveys a sense of urbanity that Tours does not.
12
Your prescription for "clear and distinct enunciation, correct grammar, standard vocabulary" works if there is an universal standard for what all that means. There ain't. I have a Ph.D. in English, plus a BA in German and a minor in French (and a law degree) and twenty years as an English professor and ten as a law professor. Believe me, it's all arbitrary. And regional.
18
@Robert Goodell: With the few exceptions like Buffalo and Rochester, NY and Erie, PA, the Great Lakes dialect region is completely in the Midwest, so it was odd to separate the two. Also, there is no American language. You were referring to US English.
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Max Brockmeier: No, the Great Lakes Cities (Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, Milwaukee) share their own unique accent. It is different than the accents of Midwesterners from rural areas as well as cities far from the Great Lakes such as Columbus, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City, Minneapolis.
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We are starting to give up our regional accent. Currently, I use two accents.
We use the Midwestern for business, because of the prejudice against the southern accent. It is a little sad.
Then, when we are with our family and friends, at football games, BBQ's and Country Music festivals, we speak Midland Southern again.
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Sadly I agree with you. I am originally from the South and now live in Ann Arbor Michigan. After living here 20 years, I am still amazed at what people will say to me regarding my accent. I had the wife of a physician colleague actually laughing and asking me to repeat the pronunciation of a word. I am always on edge here, and only feel I can relax amongst family and friends down South.
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As another commented, I miss the time when US accents were more distinctive. Mass media and mobility have homogenized them. It was possible to make very good guesses about what part of GA or VA one was from as I was growing up. It's still possible to find differentiated accents among older and more rural people.
I realize this is not the main thrust of the article. When people complain about non native speakers' accents, my response is I wish my ability to speak another language were as good as theirs.
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I spent my first 48 years in the south, my last 20 in Oregon. People frequently comment on my accent and often not in a positive way. At first that bothered me to the point that I almost hired someone to help “cleanse” my accent. Im glad I didn’t.
One of the best programs on language was the PBS The Story of English narrated by Robert MacNeil. It was especially interesting to learn about the roots of regional dialects of English around the world, as well as the origins of English from so many different streams of cultures.
I am always impressed by speakers who learned English as a second language and have had to work through its highly irregular structure and translations.
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My wife and I loved that show...and even bought it on a long-ago lost VHS tape.
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"Such judgments are purely social — to linguists, the distinctions are arbitrary."
That statement, in a nutshell, summarizes the difference between a scientist studying something and the people who are living it.
Is 'thinking like a scientist' of any practical use in life?
I would say just the opposite. The way each person speaks, the way each person dresses, the way each person carries himself contain valuable clues about character, education, and personality. Part of being an adult is knowing how to rapidly size someone up based on superficial traits.
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I couldn't disagree more. Part of being an adult—a mature, respectful adult living in a diverse world—is recognizing that your immediate assumptions are often flawed. Making sweeping judgments about someone's "character" based on their accent or dress is precisely what we teach children NOT to do. Please, resist the temptation to "rapidly size someone up based on superficial traits" and take the time to know and understand them instead.
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Jonathan - The word "prejudice" has its roots in "pre-judge". I would refine this by saying it is to judge someone before having all the evidence, to judge someone based on superficial qualities that associate that person with a specific group. The individual person is judged on the basis of an opinion formed about the group to which it appears to belong rather than on that person's individual traits.
This is prejudice.
The factors you mentioned are all relevant to understanding a person. But they are not adequate for a FULL understanding of that person. To judge based on ONLY the factors you described is to "pre-judge". Let them be part of the first round of evidence gathered, but do not judge based on them. Understand the specific qualities of the individual before judging.
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Yes, stereotypes are real timesavers for the intellectually lazy!
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I grew up in Iowa. I'm pretty sure that was defined as "no accent" (at least in one point of time) and I remember network TV sending newscasters there to get rid of their accents.
After decades in Texas, when I go back to Iowa they make fun of my accent. I tell them "y'all are loco!".
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To say someone has an accent is to refer to location. An accent is a sound that differs from the local sound. I don't have an accent in California, but I do in Texas or Alabama or London. My son-in-law does not have an accent in London, but he does in California, or Canada or Boston. So of course there is no such thing as language without accent. It's common sense, isn't it? Problems develop around accents when there are prejudices.
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If you listen carefully you can hear several different accents among native born Clevelanders. Upper middle class Jews in Shaker Heights who attended the neighborhood school sound differently from their WASP neighbor who attended private school a half mile away. If you were raised on Cleveland’s near west side your accent is different from a friend who was raised farther west in Bay Village.
Every community has diverse accents like Cleveland’s. Listen attentively and you’ll be amazed.
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Accents are less the issue than is understanding how a language should be spoken in terms of sentence construction and use of grammar. With these basics accents are less the issue.
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The US is the only country I have been in that does not value speaking more than one's birth language. In Europe, anyone with a pretense to education will speak several languages - a birth language (dialect), a national language, and at least one bridge languages, frequently English. In this situation, it is inevitable that accents will be more or less evident. Even my fractured German was welcome in Switzerland.
Accents as a hindrance to communication are a problem in the US, primarily because we are so busy framing a response (or retort) to someone else, that we don't bother to -listen- to what they are saying, at any level. There has been considerable criticism of Melania Trump's "hard to understand" accent. Having lived in Europe, I find her perfectly comprehensible, and the accent somewhat charming.
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This is a really wonderful article. The main takeaway was clearly lost on many of the commenters, but as the daughter of Nicaraguan immigrants who learned English upon immigrating to Canada in their mid-20s, I appreciate your message on the harm of language discrimination and worthy reminder that we all have accents.
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So, my inability to understand accented English is due to a defect in the U.S. national character and I should just "bother to listen"? Good luck with that.
Learning a second language, for most Americans, doesn't really justify the effort involved. Given the choice between, say, 2 years of Spanish or 2 years of higher math, the math is more likely to be useful to me. Most jobs requiring foreign language fluency are taken by immigrants who are thought to "speak like natives".
@Steve:
You wrote, "The US is the only country I have been in that does not value speaking more than one's birth language."
If this is the case then you have never been to the United Kingdom, where speaking only English is paramount. And FYI, the United Kingdom (at present) is part of Europe.
There is no need to bad-mouth the US, since America is actually quite multi-lingual. Take a trip outside of America and you will see.
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I have been learning Japanese, translating in both directions, and teaching English as second language for a long time. I disagree with the author. Accents are not all okay. Some cause severe problems. If you cannot pronounce a phoneme, you cannot hear it either. You will not understand, and native speakers will not understand you.
The best example in Japanese-accented English is the distinction between L and R. Japanese has a sound intermediate between them, somewhat like the English R. The tongue and lips are held in different positions for the three sounds. In my first week of learning Japanese, the professor, Eleanor Jorden, explained the differences between these three sounds. She drew diagrams showing how each sound is produced. We practiced again and again, with native speakers coaching us.
Over the years I have encountered countless Japanese people who struggle with English because they were never taught how to pronounce an English "R" and "L," so they cannot hear the difference, either. They were also never taught the difference between the definite and indefinite articles "the" and "a," and many other fundamentals. The spent years trying to learn English, making little progress because they never learned these fundamentals. This is tragic.
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What you are saying is true, however it clarifies the difference and the challenge between pronunciation and accent.
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..."Japanese people who struggle with English because they were never taught how to pronounce an English "R" and "L," so they cannot hear the difference."
That's not why they do not hear it. Have you ever heard, say, a Chinese speaker say two names/words and assert that they are different, yet to you they sound exactly the same? This is fairly common with Chinese first names. They hear the difference very clearly, but you do not, not because you were not instructed but because there are many sounds that you cannot hear and distinguish correctly. You (and the rest of us) lost the ability to hear many language sounds while you were still an infant. The infant brain starts acquiring the language of its carers right away, by tuning into the language sounds, and filtering out other, irrelevant sounds (those that are not often repeated in the environment). By about one year of age, infants can no longer hear many sounds that are used in other languages, and will never again be able to.
My first language is not English. I can actually hear some English sounds that I cannot produce, and will never be able to produce. The same is true with my French. Also, my first language does not have articles. I have certainly been taught about them, and well, but I still occasionally omit them. Don't judge so harshly. I very much doubt your Japanese is as good as you think it is.
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You wrote: "You (and the rest of us) lost the ability to hear many language sounds while you were still an infant."
That is incorrect. I learned to speak Japanese starting at 18. I can hear every distinction (every phoneme) and I speak well enough that at times I have been mistaken for a Japanese person on the telephone. I have taught many people English as a second language, including adults. Anyone, at any age, can learn to pronounce new sounds when instructed properly. Once you learn to pronounce a difference in sounds correctly, you will always hear it correctly. I have taught many Japanese adults how to pronounce "L" and "R" correctly. I can teach it a half hour. If they practice every day for a few weeks, they all master it.
Many adults also learn to speak their own language with sounds their dialect does not include. For example, Indian speakers of English learn to speak American dialects in order to work in telemarketing.
Proper application of linguistics and common-sense techniques can overcome these problems. There is no truth to the notion that our ability to learn to pronounce atrophies after childhood. It is true that a first language will interfere with second language learning. I have taught English to Japanese children around age 10. They do not learn much faster than adults, except that they are less inhibited and they have more time.
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Translators are often impossible to schedule for a normal parent/teacher conference. Whenever a parent apologizes for their English, I try to respond by saying that their English is so much better than my Pashtun, Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish or Tagalog. I think I took seven years of French in middle and high school and can't speak much of anything.
About 10 years ago I took a three-year math training for school teachers. One of the teachers had been part of a dual language approach for English learners, a program which was abandoned by the state, primarily because the students were not mastering English. Every time this teacher spoke, the rest of us would listen with rapt attention. She had an incredibly strong accent. I could only understand about one third of the words she spoke. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for your students to figure out what she was saying. We have they same problem with our one (1) middle school counselor. My fifth graders would frequently say they couldn't understand her during orientation. It's so discouraging that the school districts don't send these people to some classes to reduce their accents, so that they can be better understood.
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If a teacher ‘s accent is so strong that the students complain that they cannot understand him or her, I would say that the teacher should recognize this and make more effort to communicate, not merely talk. Make eye contact. Talk slower. Point to an object when you say it’s name. If your message is not getting through, you are just flapping your lips.
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It may/may not serve this discussion that I speak several European languages, have lived and conversed successfully in several South American countries, and as a teacher and tutor of English as a Second Language I have witnessed and respected the difficulties of useful pronunciation. During the bilingual program cited above, I had to sit through a linguistics class in Spanish with non-native speakers who failed English so egregiously that this was arranged for them get graduate credits. None of this has anything to do with the intense frustration we endure here on the telephone when important information is at stake and the conveyer of it is unintelligible. Language is not an intellectual curiosity for academics - it's communication. The criterion should be "do I understand what you are telling me?" Whether it's a university professor or a surgeon's nurse or a billing clerk, say it clearly, please. Never mind about "negative stereotypical assumptions". In basic English, if it's important and I understand it, that's communication as it should be.
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These are all legitimate points. However, as a Professor of Speech-Language Pathology (retired), my team developed software that shows foreign born speakers what the stress, rhythm, and timing of their speech looks like. For Asian speakers, acoustic analysis clearly shows objective differences in syllable stress (SIL-a-ble versus si-LABLE). It's the timing and rhythm of some asian speech - not necessarily the pronunciation of consonants or vowels - that throws off a listener. For certain groups, accent IS in the mouth of the speaker; NOT in the ear of the listener! Based on reports of graduates, accent does influence promotion to positions requiring better oral communication skills.
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I once worked with an Asian-origin English speaker and found that I didn't understand him instantaneously - his speech seemed to require a buffering before my brain understood it. I'm sure he thought the delay reflected my stupidity. I found it interesting to think of this as my decoding problem rather than his understandable speaking limitation.
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English is not my native language and I have an accent. At times people don't understand what I asking and they ask me to repeat it - either I repeat the sentence or find an alternate way of expressing my idea. There are others who just find it easier to mock me rather than engage in an intelligent conversation. Often these are by people who use the word "like" as if it is conjunction of phrases or words or even as a punctuation. I feel Donal Trump is one of them. He uses last few words of his sentence again as a punctuation for the next sentence. Yet he mocks almost everyone I know.
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I agree. I teach ESL and my goal with pronunciation is clarity and nothing more. I have some students who want to learn "Oxford English", and I ask them "why?" It's fine for people who belong to the demographic that naturally speaks that way, but I encourage my students to embrace their accents. (Accents are charming!) We concentrate on vocab, grammar and of course fluency. Many of my students have gone off to study in the UK or the US and a decade later they speak beautiful idiomatic English, and although their accents often naturally change as and adapt to the speaking patterns common in the place they're living, luckily hints of where they began their journey always remain. I find it's generally true that as long as non-native speakers speak with confidence and don't worry about little misakes, others will focus on what they're saying and not how they say it.
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As someone not born in the US I have an accent so was really glad to read this. It reminded me of Fernando Lama's visits on the Tonight Show. Johnny Carson frequently made fun, in good spirit, of Lamas's thick Argentinian accent. His response was "you know Johnny I have an accent because I speak one more language than you".
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Regarding Johnny Carson, he's from Nebraska, a state once declared "accent free." If there is such a thing.
The student who wrote, "For goodness sake, give us a professor who speaks English" probably expressed most poignantly the reaction, verbalized and unverbalized, that my speech usually triggers -- as if my deep baritone was not discomfiting enough.
At the beginning of each semester, I try to put my students at ease. I tell them that they are probably not used to hearing anyone talk the way I talk. I urge them to stop me whenever they can't make out what I am trying to say, and that I would repeat it or write it on the board if they still didn't understand.
I tell them that, because of my foreign origin, it is sometimes, it is just as hard for me to understand them as it is for them to understand me, and that they should take no offence if asked them to repeat what they had just said.
Rarely did they take me up on my offer. A few would rather mock me than demand clarification. Most just suffered in silence!
Outside the campus, it has been an entirely different matter. Unless you pronounce a word exactly as the locals do, you are regarded as educationally inferior for certain, and probably morally inferior as well.
The more polite tell me the find my accent "exotic." The question that follows invariaby is "Where do you come from?"
I tell them they have an accent, too -- an American accent.
They don't get it until they travel abroad.
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In University my daughter had a professor whose attempts at English were not at all understandable. I do not know what language he was speaking but i could not get one single word.
I spend a lot of my time dealing with non-native English speakers. Normally it's not a problem, there's an accent but the meaning of what they say is clear.
How the students were supposed to learn anything from this professor I cannot imagine.
So, there is definitely a difference between the ability to communicate and the lack thereof.
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Thanks. You are correct ---- everyone has an accent. This is a phonological fact. In fact, it goes beyond phonology. Deaf people will tell you there are definitely accents within groups of signers of a given sign language.
The only thing left to battle about is which accent is more preferred in a given context and the reasons for that preference. This is a topic that sociolinguists tackle professionally and all others simply address with whatever incorrect ideas about language they've absorbed over the years. We Americans certainly have a lot of odd ideas about accents, ideas tinged with lingering hints of racism and elitism that we publicly proclaim without a shred of embarrassment. Our proclamations show we are not only bad language learners --- but we're equally awful at learning about language. French and Italian speakers of ESL are routinely given more of a pass for their accents (so "romantic" or "sexy") than are Chinese and Japanese speakers of ESL. Name the last time you heard anyone say anything positive about these latter accents in English --- unless the speaker was speaking with some modified "British" accent (a term that does no justice to the hundreds of British accents out there) picked up from years of colonial schooling. Yet there is often no difference in actual intelligibility in the way all these speakers speak English.
I enjoyed this article and will request permission to use it in a linguistics course I teach!
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Your comment is very interesting and informative, but I don't see how what you describe shows that anyone is "awful at learning about language" or awful at anything. You write, "Yet there is often no difference in actual intelligibility," as if there would have to be such a difference for the response not to be awful. Can't it just be a fact that, to some people, French and Italian (accents or the languages themselves) have a certain aesthetic quality that Chinese and Japanese do not, that the former sound romantic and sexy when the latter don't?
Growing up, I always thought that the sound of Italian was more beautiful than the sound of German. The languages do sound different (as does music by different composers). Why must a difference in how one responds to those sounds be chalked up to "racism" or "elitism"? Why does every aesthetic response need to be denigrated, any more than whether one is attracted to people of the same sex or a different sex?
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I'm from Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. I always thought I had no accent, because I spoke "broadcast English",
Then my husband got a job in Toronto. For a while I worked as a cashier in a health food store, and some of the Canadian customers would say, "You must be from Chicago"; or "You must be from Detroit"; or "New York" because I sounded like friends of theirs from those cities.
That's how I discovered I had an accent.
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As a former Rental Manager of Roosevelt Island NYC, I was exposed to 100’s of accents as many of our residents were UN staff. I kept a world map on my office wall and placed a pin for each represented country and city.
As a Cuban born man, my family moved from Cuba to Puerto Rico in 1968. In 1979 we moved to Newburgh, NY; Then on 1980 we moved to NYC. I had to learn English fast. Being 12 years old, I was able to learn the new language rather quickly.
My brothers and I have a strong thick NYC ACCENT. I’ve been in Brooklyn for nearly 25 yrs and I can joking go from “How youse doin?” to “Oy Vey” I’ve even had my moments where my accent has been extremely thick, specially when a West Coast friend joked about Bronx friends and I jokingly said in my strongest NYC accent “say one more word about da Bronx or Brooklyn people and I’ll cut you!”
We all had the best laugh ever over how thick my NYC ACCENT came out.
My personal & profession back ground has allowed me to develop an ear to easily understand accents.
I find them intriguing and charming.
Its a wonderful way to celebrated our heritage while sharing our Humanity.
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I learned that everyone has an accent when I lived in India. One day an Indian told me he couldn’t understand me because my midwestern accent was too strong. Now I live in Mexico and while I strive to perfect my grammar and increase my Spanish skills, I’ve accepted the fact that my Rs will never sound as beautiful as a well trilled Mexican R.
What I find amazing are the Americans and Canadians who move to Mexico and can’t be bothered to learn Spanish. They rob themselves of a vastly rich experience.
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It is very sad indeed that very few expats make an effort to learn Spanish. Mexicans have a rapier wit...even better than the Brits.
One of the problems for expats learning Spanish
is that there aren't enough qualified SEL teachers.
Too many get bogged down in grammar. What people need are the first 200 words and
key phrases.
saludos de Yucatan
ancient Canadian
3
You might say the same about Mexicans and Central Americans who move to the U. S. or Canada, and never bother to learn English, in some families down to the second generation. Do they not also rob themselves of "a vastly rich experience"? Oh, you meant to say that, but it wasn't politically correct to do so? Right!
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Not only does everyone speak with an accent, but those "accents" continue to change within a relatively short time during one's life.
Even in "neutral" mid-American speech, I have noticed a pronounced shift, within the last ten years, in the pronunciation of many words containing the consonant blends of "st" and "str" to "sht" and "shrtr." It is quite common now to hear "shtreet" for "street" and "adminishtration" for "administration"--as if English is emulating German (Strasse, pronounced Shrtrass-eh). If this trend continues (I hear it from NPR newsreaders and TV reporters now), it may become a new "norm."
Trying to pinpoint a person's accent in order to pigeonhole who they "are" in relation to who you "are" is trying to stop a stream/"shtream" by cupping your hands to catch a bit of it at a time.
It's wonderful to hear accents and the variant grammatical constructs (e.g., waiting in line vs. waiting on line). It makes life interesting. Marvelous, our capacity for expression, communication, and comprehension, despite the "accent" of the speaker. Listen closely, and learn!
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