The importance of recognizing and appreciating linguistic diversity rather than judging people based on their accents
- Foreign-accented individuals are often perceived as being less intelligent than individuals with an American accent
By Keerthana Gotur
“Accent by itself is a shallow measure of language proficiency, the linguistic equivalent of judging people by their looks. Instead, we should become aware of our linguistic biases and learn to listen more deeply before forming judgments. How large and how varied is the person’s vocabulary? Can she participate in most daily interactions? How much detail can he provide when retelling something? Can she hold her own in an argument?”
— Roberto Rey Agudo, “Everyone Has an Accent” – The New York Times
The Accent That Belongs to Nowhere
I sat in my Organic Chemistry class in sophomore year. The professor asked us a question, the answer to which was ‘arenes’. It was an answer I was fairly confident about, so I raised my hand high, fingertips outstretched, and she called on me.
“You over there, up in the third row,” which had been my name for the entire duration of the course. Not Keerthana, or KG, which I had mentioned to her on several different occasions.
‘Uh-ree-ns’ was what I was taught to pronounce it as. So that’s what I said, as loudly and clearly as possible. I received a quizzical stare from the professor in return.
“What was that?”
I repeated myself, trying to soften my Rs a little more in an attempt to mimic an American accent, and I felt a million stares focused on me, a million ears trying to decipher what I was saying.
“Alkenes?” she asked, the confusion in her voice amplified by her mic. Obviously, that wasn’t the answer, and I knew that wasn’t it, but now everyone in that 120-person room probably thought that I said that was the answer. My face burned like the sun and my mouth turned to sand, words sticking like pebbles in my throat. But I didn’t give up; I didn’t want to look more stupid than I already did. I nudged my white friend, who repeated my answer to the professor. She finally nodded in recognition, satisfied with my friend’s pronunciation, and moved on with her lesson. I couldn’t. I wanted to sink deep into my small chair in that lecture room, wishing those faded, musty cushions would swallow me. I knew that every one of those 120 people had just heard me embarrass myself, knew that they all likely were labeling me as ‘that one girl with the accent’.
I never wanted to speak up in that class anymore.
❉ ❉ ❉
Our knowledge of language comes from around us. Although my parents speak two different Indian regional languages, most times, my mother and father fire the two languages at each other in quick exchange, my mother’s melodic Tamil and my father’s robust Telugu dancing around each other without skipping a beat. Sometimes, when they talk to my younger sister and I, they speak in English. A less rhythmic English, one more rigid and less sing-song, but nevertheless an English with not-so-subtle influences of Indian enunciation.
English was ultimately the first language I learned, the language that bridged our polyglot family together. An American English. Having grown up in the diverse suburbia of Tarrytown, New York, I was taught how to pronounce vowels and the alphabet the American way at Montessori school, which trumped the pronunciations of my parents in the Indian way.
The Indian accent offers a rich mosaic of sounds and rhythms that are deeply influenced by the country’s rich linguistic diversity. So much so that our country has its own dialect of English. From consonants to vowels, every aspect of Indian English highlights how its 22 recognized regional languages shape this accent; depending on the letters in each language, certain sounds are amplified and certain sounds softened. Consonant endings, like words ending in -d, -t and -g, are especially emphasized in a staccato-like fashion, unlike the way they gradually fade out in American accents. They ring out at the end of each word with the sound of raindrops on a sheet of metal.
Most interestingly, however, is that some sounds are just completely changed if they don’t exist in the area’s regional language or dialect. For example, some regions develop a lack of distinction between the pronunciations of ‘v’ and ‘w’ because of the lack of the latter’s existence in many regional languages2. ‘z’ is often substituted for ‘j’, ‘aw’ sounds like ‘aa’, and so on. My friend doesn’t like ‘wegetables’ on his food; vaat is yuver faavirit type aaf pijja?
And this was the accent I found myself immersed in at the age of four, and the accent that my sister grew up with, when my family decided to move to the metropolitan city of Hyderabad, India. Our international 15-hour flight was a portal into a completely different world with different-looking people who all sounded different from me, even though we were speaking the same language, and singing the same songs. Like the alphabet song.
“Q R S, tee you vee,” my classmates and I sang together.
“W, X, Y and zee,” I sang. My classmates didn’t. In India, ‘Z’ was zedd, not zee.
While I was getting used to the presence of bidets and the absence of bathtubs in the bathrooms—or washrooms as one calls them in India—I was also busy switching my vocalized ‘h’ from ‘hay-ch’ to ‘heh-ch’. In the meanwhile, I was unconsciously getting the hang of the rhythms and melodies of Indian English, so quickly that I lost my American accent within a year. My only exception was the letter ‘z’: I refused to change it because ‘vee’ and ‘zedd’ don’t rhyme. Vee and zee do.
❉ ❉ ❉
Most of my classmates were born in India. Their first language, their mother tongue, was likely a regional Indian one. Naturally, those languages influenced the way they spoke English, especially with their rolling r’s and distinct pronunciations. My mother, however, insisted that I tell everyone my mother tongue was English. This always puzzled me, especially since her first language was Tamil. But the first language I truly learned was English, not Tamil; in hindsight, growing up with English as my first language probably prevented me from adopting those accent and pronunciation shifts typical of Indian English.
This seems to exist in every country with a non-English language. According to Asher and Garcia, the age at which a person begins learning a second language (the language in this case being English) affects accent retention. They found that most Cuban children who began learning English between the ages of 1 and 6 did not retain a Cuban accent, but the percentages of children retaining their accent increased as children learned English later.
However, foreign accents can sometimes be extinguished or mitigated depending on when English is learned.
“Undoubtedly the way one pronounced a word was a giveaway.”
Kalpana Mohan, author of An English Made in India: How a Foreign Language Became Local, was one such example. Born in South India, her English was laden with strong influences of Tamil and Malayalam. When she moved to Tanzania, where locals spoke English with a lilt of Swahili, she left the country with “an accent bereft of Indian regional cadences”. Mohan figured out soon enough that “there were as many English accents as there were colors of skin and that there were as many Englishes as there were places in the world… American English, Australian English, the English of the Caribbean, the English of parts of Africa.”4 And most importantly, Indian English, of which she—and I—are a part of, just like the thousands of English speakers from India.
Throughout my years of Indian schooling, I would often meet students like me, who moved with their families from the States to ‘properly experience India’. But most of us inevitably returned to America, usually in pursuit of our higher education. With us, we took abstract fragments of India like heirlooms we had accumulated over time. Some bring more than others; I brought with me
14 years’ worth of intangible relics that I will forever store in my mental museum. Words of camaraderie like ‘yaar’, and ‘bey’, words like ‘arrey’ that explain unexplainable emotions, words that creeped into my vocabulary along with those Indian enunciations that permanently buried themselves into my voice and speech.
I left India legally an American citizen and socioculturally an Indian immigrant; it was never a spectrum, but I felt I belonged somewhere in the middle.
❉ ❉ ❉
When we first landed back in the United States, my family moved into a predominantly South Asian community in Charlotte, North Carolina. Nothing like my diverse neighborhood in Tarrytown. We visited my family friends often, who spoke with the same rhythms and enunciations as I did, so I made the observation—and maybe too prematurely—that my Indian accent may not have been completely out of place in the United States.
But I was proven wrong.
When college began at the University of North Carolina, I spent my first couple of years there feeling isolated and misunderstood. My every word had to be twisted for the convenience of the listener, making it even harder to communicate than it already was with the tall, impenetrable wall of the cultural barrier. I often found myself stumbling through my words, developing a stutter that I never had experienced before. I felt the other person’s disinterest in continuing the conversation grow as they realized that I had to constantly repeat my words, sometimes even spell them out, for their clarity. My professors struggled to remember my name, even if I simplified it for them by just giving them my initials, and struggled even more to understand me when I asked or answered questions in class.
A study done by Dragojevic, Giles, and Watson shows that foreign-accented English speakers tend to be rated less favorably on various traits (like intelligence and friendliness) than native, standard-accented English speakers. But these attitudes aren’t just specific to this language; people from any country mostly favor their natives. For instance, Australian men see men with British English accents less favorably than men with Australian English accents. Similarly,
Guatemalans preferred sales pitches given by a person with a Guatemalan accent as opposed to a person with a Spanish accent.
And I guess Americans, like my sophomore-year Organic Chemistry professor, prefer answers from a person with an American accent as opposed to a person—like me—with an Indian accent.
❉ ❉ ❉
Sundays in India had their own rhythm, a lazy kind of energy that brought the family together in one place: the living room. We sat cross-legged on the cool floor, savoring the cool breeze of the air conditioning unit, as we aimlessly flipped through television channels in search of something to watch. More often than not, we’d settle on the ‘international’ channel, which usually featured The Simpsons and their yellow, bug-eyed characters.
One stood out to me more than the rest: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. For a side character, he was hard to ignore, but I’m sure his impossibly long surname was easy to forget. What stood out more than his name, though, was his voice. His unbelievably exaggerated Indian accent cut through the dialogue, so perfectly timed with his racially stereotypical jokes that, to me, it was clear he existed to be the show’s comedic relief. I later found out he was voiced by a white, Jewish man, funnily enough. With every joke and every thickly-accented “Thank you, come again,” I didn’t know whether to laugh at him or at myself.
I wonder if that’s what I sound like to people?
Non-Indians weren’t the only ones who made fun of that accent, to my surprise. My freshman-year roommate, an Indian by origin herself, turned my English into her favorite punchline. She would make it known if I pronounced something differently than what most people would say; within seconds, I’d hear her loud snickers and guffaws as she relayed what she heard to my roommates, poorly mimicking what I would say. Ironically, she told me that her immigrant parents spoke with the same accent I did, and that she would make fun of them too. Maybe they didn’t care. But sometimes I wondered if they, too, felt the need to carefully watch how they structured their words around her, the need to conform to the accent she spoke.
My sister, Krithi, couldn’t escape from the jeers either.
“My friends used to fake an Indian accent to make it sound funny,” she told me. She never found it funny.
❉ ❉ ❉
Going into my second semester of freshman year, I knew I needed to make a change. I had begun to feel the pressure of conforming—the very human need to assimilate into society. And so I began to whip my tongue into place, attempting to tame it into producing the soft consonants that I heard in everyone’s voice. The best form of accent practice proved to be my involvement with my university’s student-led-and-ran newspaper. I’ve spent hours recording interviews with students, faculty, virtually anyone who would talk to me. Each one felt like a test of my ability to reshape my words, to smooth the rough edges of my malleable speech. Somewhere in those dozens of audio files saved on my laptop is an inadvertent record of how my voice changed over the years, bit by bit, as I adjusted to life in North Carolina.
But even today, after three years of attempting to recreate my childhood accent and battling with the accent I developed over fourteen years in India, I still retain some of those Indian-isms. Somehow, to the ears of the average American, my ‘red’ sounds like ‘dead’, and when I spell my name, the T in my name becomes a P. So I spell my name the same way my immigrant parents do; K for kite, E for elephant, E for elephant, R for rat, T for Tom, and so on. My tongue still chooses to remain loyal to my Indian roots, refusing to give up those specific pronunciations as hard as I try. But its patriotism has been costing me my assimilation.
However, Krithi was different. Her Indian accent was the one she learned to speak English with, but all it took was a few months for her to leave it behind, burying it in the depths of her heart. So casually, as if it were nothing.
“How? Did you practice?” was all I could muster. There was no way she did.
“Maybe I did in India, when I was like, How do they pronounce certain things?” she said. That surprised me. She was never the kind to put in too much effort. For her, if it happened naturally, it happened; otherwise, it was never going to.
I wondered if there was something that motivated her to make the accent switch as quickly as she did. But her usual humor seemed to evaporate from her tone as she said that she didn’t have a choice. She said she felt like she wasn’t going to be respected as much as she was.
“I didn’t want to seem like a… stupid girl.”
Our experiences are not unusual. A 2017 research study showed that accents reduce comprehensibility, where stories told in ‘unfamiliar’ (Punjabi or Mandarin) accents were less understood. Things said by someone with a foreign accent are perceived to be less credible and are harder to recall. Everything, overall, contributes to the perception of foreign-accented individuals as being less intelligent than individuals with an American accent.
❉ ❉ ❉
Maybe in another country, you would be me. You would have never chosen to develop or retain your accent—it just happened without you having to think about it. You would’ve had the same intention in your words as someone else speaking in the more ‘socially accepted’ accent of that country. Yet, you would be at a disadvantage purely based on the way you pronounce a few vowels and consonants.
Over time, the constant judgment would start to erode your confidence in your abilities. Even though you’d know it’s the perception of you that’s flawed, you’d begin to question your own competence, wondering if the way you speak is the problem.
Wondering if you’re stupid like my sister said.
Read: A Tribute to the Fight for Linguistic Identity
❉ ❉ ❉
In Hyderabad, I was privileged enough to live next to a library, a haven where I’d spend countless hours engrossed in the literary world until the sun set. As I grew older, I found myself venturing over to the nonfiction section more often, ditching Harry Potter and Percy Jackson in hopes of developing a more sophisticated taste in books. Once, I picked out Kalpana Mohan’s book, wrapped in a thick, glossy transparent cover. As I took a stab at reading it, I felt my sixteen-year-old self losing interest in it. At the time, I was probably too unappreciative of Indian English to understand what she was talking about. After all, I was constantly made to believe that it was the inferior version of its American and British relatives.
Even though India gained independence from the British in 1947, the 200 years of colonialism had left its stain behind, one that lasts even today. English was a language that the British hoped would dissolve the barriers of mother tongue, place of birth, caste, or creed; unfortunately, according to Mohan, “the very divisions the best English tried to dispel began to build steep walls between groups of people.” Our international school in India witnessed this divide. The school I attended was no stranger to students who arrived from the United States with their strong American accents and their lack of Indian influence, and there was a palpable difference between those who had the American accent (the ‘posh’ kids) and those who didn’t. The non-Western nuances of Indian English were seen as imperfections that had to be hammered out and fixed to fit the satisfactory mold of ‘elite’ English that was taught at international schools in India. The English that was growing to resemble American English.
Coming to the United States, I witnessed an undeniable parallelism between the implication of speaking accented English, both in the United States and India, and the sense of superiority that seemed to come with speaking in an American accent.
“They make us seem like we’re stupid for having one,” Krithi retorted.
Why? With a language spoken so widely across the world, there was bound to be variation; regardless, English is English no matter how it’s spoken; there is no one true ‘authentic’ way to speak it. Or at least that’s how it should be.
But one must adapt. As my sister did, and I have learned to. My speech, although better than when I first moved to North Carolina, remains an imperfect illusion. It is one that is interspersed with occasional stutters and careful pauses in order for my tongue to catch a break, for my mind to remember how the next word should be pronounced, for my voice to mimic the right intonations, for my accent to sound believable enough.
When I speak to my family and friends from India, the façade crumbles. My voice is sixteen years old again before we left India, and I am back in a world where my words don’t need to be rehearsed. My tongue moves freely, unburdened by the weight of fitting in and the pressure to be understood. But Krithi’s fully-fledged American accent creeps into the Tamil and Telugu she attempts to speak with our relatives when we visit in the summers. Lately, she’s been the subject of our family’s jibes—” Oh, she’s barely Indian, so white-washed now!”—while I am lauded for my ability to still speak those regional languages with no hint of incorrect pronunciation.
And so I discovered that our accents while speaking English seemed to have become a measurement of our nationality, more than citizenship did. My sister fully embraced her new accent and my parents unapologetically held on to their original accents. But there I was, refusing—or unable—to relinquish my Indian accent, even if it meant it would seep into and contaminate the English I spoke in the United States. There I was, with my in-the-middle accent that belonged in neither country.
There I was, feeling like I belonged nowhere but in between.
Read: A Call to Preserve and Promote Linguistic Heritage
_________________
Born in New York and brought up in Hyderabad, India, Keerthana Gotur is currently an undergraduate student at UNC Chapel Hill. As a Biology major, journalist, polyglot and music director-composer, she aspires to combine her love for storytelling, humanities and the arts with her interests in healthcare.
Courtesy: India Currents
