Accents. We all got them.
It was my freshwoman (:P) year at college. A kind of a melting-pot campus. People from all over the world. The amount of different accented Englishes, I was hearing every day was a lot. Having not lived outside of Kerala much, I was hearing the English of north Indian languages — Hindi, Marathi, Odiya etc for the first time.
I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying. During my classes, I tried to sit in the front rows and listen keenly to understand what the professors were saying. Let’s not even talk about those who had gone to visit foreign countries for a couple of semesters and came back with an accent which was completely incomprehensible to me.
Anyways, this one professor was talking about the renaissance — the period of cultural, artistic and political rebirth in Europe following the Middle Ages. I wasn’t that well informed about it but had some familiarity. But I wasn’t hearing renaissance as ‘renaissance’. What he said was sounding to me like ‘denaijens’. The word which his Odiya-Bengali accented English tongue was pronouncing as renaissance fell in my Malayalam accented ears and was processed in my brain as ‘Dinosaurs’!
I did wonder though, why are we talking about dinosaurs in the class of literature? Are we starting from the origin of life on earth and the gradual evolution, extinction and survival of species? Then it would take some time for lectures on actual literature to begin. Shaking me off from my ambiguous thoughts, the professor asked a question…something like this. “What do you think is the best example that proves renaissance?” I am hearing this as “What do you think is the best example that proves dinosaurs?”
Wasn’t this too obvious, I thought. I almost raised my hand to say “Sir, the discovery of fossils”. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the small-time villager girl in me was very anxious to speak in a class full of students who had much richer vocabulary and literary-cultural exposure. By then someone answered about some literature or artwork which truly represented the Renaissance and I was saved from embarrassment.
Yes, we all have accents. Maybe strong or weak. Unless and until you went through some accent reduction training. Or unless and until you were brought up in an environment with people who underwent accent reduction training.
English is a hybrid language with myriads of spelling rules and sounds. Most of the world learns English as their second language. When you have an accent, all it means is that you know another language. You have your roots in a different culture, not the one which colonized almost all of the world.
Yet, people accent-shame. We deal with what is unfamiliar to us, in different ways. Sometimes the unfamiliar is too strange that it’s scary. If the unfamiliar is harmless then it comes across as funny. One of the effects of having a strong accent is being constantly laughed at and corrected by colleagues; the other could be to have to listen to your colleagues/classmates complain about our accent ‘polluting’ their language because they have to interact with you. What it does to the person at the receiving end, is that they become so conscious of every word they utter; that they gradually begin to speak lesser with diminishing confidence.
Accent shaming reeks of privilege. The privilege of having been born into families which had better cultural and linguistic capital because of their class-caste status. The privilege of being educated in elite institutions which had teachers who had gotten trained in ‘proper’ pronunciation. The privilege of having the affordability to train for accent reduction.
Let’s not get started on how some accents are cool or cute and some aren’t. For the people of India, the vernacular accented English speakers aren’t cool enough. But make them meet a person who speaks with any European accent especially British, they will admire it. The level of coolness of your accent is dependent on the exoticness of its location, class, caste, academic background and such factors.
As long as communication isn’t too severely affected accents are fine. Accents are humane, local and deeply cultural. Rather than overstressing too much on changing people’s accents, we should develop the mindset to communicate the confusion and misunderstandings which might ensue.
Well, sometimes the kind of confusion like the baby cheeses moment in the Modern Family TV series happens too.
Yet if the evolution of thought and the sophistication of language makes us humans — the enlightened creatures, then communication should enable each other to express vulnerability. That’s why it brings immense happiness when I read comments supporting people like Sofia Vergara and her accent against hosts like Ellen DeGeneres who comment “Ow, your accent has got so bad. It’s the worst”. Grow up, Ellens!
