
Everyone Has an Accent - kilovoltaire
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/opinion/sunday/everyone-has-an-accent.html
======
tlb
The article focuses on how standard an accent is, but to me the main factor is
whether it's familiar enough to the listener for nuanced conversation to be
understood. All English speakers are familiar with the Western US accent and
British RP. But faced with an accent they haven't heard before, they miss
nuances.

By 'nuances', I'm not talking about literary subtleties. For instance, when
you ask if someone can do something and they say "Okaaaaaay...", there's a lot
of content in the inflection of the aaaaaay that tells you how likely it is to
happen. That content is different for different accents.

Since it's a hopeless cause that everyone will learn to speak with the same
accent, people working in global businesses should learn to understand the
major world accents. It seems like an order of magnitude less work to
understand an accent than to speak it.

In the tech world, it's pretty useful to be able to understand Hindi,
Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Australian, Singapore, Israeli,
and Filipino accents.

------
dbelchamber
This is definitely useful to keep in mind, but I think one point that might
not be represented adequately is the utility of a standard. I understand that
there are difficulties for people speaking in a nonnative accent, but there is
also actual value in being close to standard and having less accents
considered standard. When many people are specializing in many things, having
a standard way of speaking allows us to more quickly understand one another
and skip the basics. The judgement that I personally make when I hear a non-
standard accent is not that they are lower in status; it's simply that it will
take more work on my end to understand them, and thus I'm less inclined to
deal with them in particular because of the language barrier and my being
lazy.

~~~
frobozz
> but there is also actual value in being close to standard and having less
> accents considered standard

So who gets to decide what is standard and what isn't and why?

~~~
tropo
We do this by consensus, instinctively choosing whatever is most typical for
the powerful, or perhaps a slightly exaggerated version of that.

So: doctors, lawyers, politicians, rich people, random TV personalities, CEOs,
generals...

~~~
frobozz
So the same accent as Malcolm Turnbull, Jacinta Ardern, The Queen, Donald
Trump, Leo Varadkar, my Polish GP, my Italian dentist, Elon Musk, Alan Sugar
and Duncan Bannatyne.

I'm not sure that works.

------
Panjam
As a child I had a strong South African accent, although I could not hear it.
I remember visiting some relatives in the north of England and being very
surprised by their accents - and saying to my mother, "thank goodness we don't
have accents!". I now have an American accent and equally don't hear my accent
when I talk, and laughed at a recording I recently heard of my childhood
accent.

~~~
classichasclass
My mother is Australian and my father is American. We (my two sisters and I)
had a distinct Australian tinge to our speech which was obvious in elementary
school. This caused me to actually miss test questions on syllabification in
class, since a more typical US accent would say e.g. i-de-a but our mother
broke it into i-dea. Mom actually protested that one to the teacher.

I've lost most of that except for a residual tendency to say eye-ther (either)
and tomahto (tomato), which my Strine wife smirks at.

~~~
hug
I'm Australian born and bred, lived here my entire life, and I say 'tomahto'
and 'eye-ther'. I'm also firmly on the right-hand-side of the trap/bath split.

It's a mistake to think that there is a single Australian accent.

~~~
toomanybeersies
There's definitely a few different Aussie accents.

I live in central Melbourne, and most people I meet have an accent very
similar to a Kiwi accent, close enough that after only a year since I came
from NZ, most people think I'm an Aussie. The accent has been easy to pick up,
just say 'feesh and cheeps' and use a high rising terminal (like you're asking
a question), and you're good to go.

However, go to the outer suburbs, or rural Australia, or up the coast to NSW
or QLD, and you get a whole array of different accents. You've got the ocker
accents, the wog accent, the aboriginals have their own accent.

------
brlewis
_My family back in Madrid would have a hard time understanding the Spanish of
my English-speaking students in my first-semester classroom._

There's good reason for this. In English, if you pronounce a vowel wrong or
leave it out, you have an accent. If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave
it out, you're unintelligible. Spanish is closer to the reverse, where the
vowels are essential and the consonants are supplemental. If you're native to
one language you'll need a lot of pronunciation drills to get good at the
other.

~~~
kevinmchugh
> If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible

I don't know anything about Spanish but this seems like an overgeneralization
for English. There's rhotic and non-rhotic accents. Public figures start
dropping their gs to appear folksy. My dad's side of the family says "the" as
"da" and they're understood if occasionally lightly mocked.

~~~
brlewis
I'm overgeneralizing both on the English side and the Spanish side. But
there's enough truth in my description to cause speakers of one language to
focus on the wrong parts of pronouncing the other language.

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zwieback
It's not just foreign accents that might lead to discrimination. After 25
years in the US I still have a German accent but I'm pretty sure that's less
of a liability than a southern or african american accent (or vernacular,
probably), at least on the coasts where I'd be likely to job-hunt.

------
kilovoltaire
> Worldwide, nonnative speakers of English outnumber natives by a ratio of
> three to one.

I was vaguely aware of this, but hadn't really thought about the numbers.

~~~
delinka
For reference:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers)

In the event it's not obvious, English is 3rd in terms of native speakers, but
you'll need to calculate all the others to compare with _all_ non-native
speakers of English.

~~~
jake-low
Of the languages on this list, here are the subset where non-native (L2)
speakers outnumber native (L1) speakers by a factor of two or more:

\- English (378m L1, 744m L2)

\- French (77m L1, 208m L2)

\- Malay (77m L1, 204m L2)

\- Swahili (16m L1, 82m L2)

\- Thai (21m L1, 40m L2)

Technically Thai isn't _quite_ 2x, but the error bars on these numbers are
generally big.

Some languages have an opposite distribution, where nearly all of the
language's speakers are L1 speakers. Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, and
Wu/Shanghainese are in this category, as well as perhaps Spanish (only ~14% of
speakers are L2, which surprised me). Many others fall somewhere in between.

This would make an interesting data visualization.

~~~
geomark
Thailand's population is around 68 million. So they are saying that only about
a third of Thais are L1 speakers of Thai? That seems quite strange.

~~~
jake-low
About 20 million people in northeastern Thailand speak Isan, a dialect of Lao.
There's also a long tail of languages spoken in minority communities. Thai is
widely spoken in Bangkok but the rural areas are much more of a patchwork in
terms of languages used. As I said though, these numbers have large error bars
so it's hard to be very certain of what the actual distribution looks like
today.

------
staunch
I consider it a point of pride that I can understand virtually anyone speaking
English no matter how strong their accent is. I assume it's from being around
a lot of people that learned English as a second language.

It would make sense that one of the factors that has made English successful
is that it's very forgiving of varying pronunciations. Some other languages
are much more precise.

But it does often require a lot more effort to understand someone speaking
with a heavy accent. A really great podcast, History on Fire, is hard for me
to listen to because the author has a strong Italian accent. I can understand
it perfectly well but it's mentally exhausting so I don't listen regularly. I
consider it a shame because I like the content.

------
tweedledee
Accents are also a class signal. Given that it’s easier to adjust your accent
than to change people’s opinion on them, it’s probably worth maki g the effort
to soften up the accent.

------
Jonovono
I've been trying to make my own accent. I sometimes hear people pronounce
things differently and prefer that way so I start trying to say it that way. I
guess less of an accent more just preferred pronunciations.

~~~
jobigoud
I also do this. There are some words that I prefer to pronounce as Brittish
English for emphasis.

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incadenza
As much as I agree, let’s obviously not judge people based on accents, I find
this a bit ridiculous. I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the idea of
visiting let’s say France, completely butchering pronunciations, and then
claiming that anybody who corrects me just has a different accent. There’s
obviously more or less correct ways to speak a language...

------
dccoolgai
[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-
am...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-america-
where-people-speak-without-accents)

------
sevensor
I've lived in enough different parts of the U.S. that I've lost track of what
sounds the vowels are supposed to make. I sound odd wherever I am.

~~~
rascul
I can relate. I've lived in many areas of the US, and picked up bits and
pieces of accents from here and there. I'll even pronounce the same word
differently at times without even realizing it, the most notable word being
creek, pronounced either "creek" or "crik". I'm liable to pronounce it both
ways in the same sentence!

------
ACow_Adonis
>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

I don't know if i'd say...less capable personally, but I'm a Urban-Modern-
Australian english speaker, as distinct from what I'll call the lower-class
suburban australian, rural-strine, or "snooty adeladian-recieved". I've
included 4 accents there where most older australian academic literature seems
to recognise 3, and I'm not including the various ethno-tinges based on how
you might pronounce the phrase "fully-sick sub-woofer" for example.

I've been personally told my accent sounds "upper-class and educated" from an
american perspective, which I find hilarious considering I think i sound like
an absolute bogan whenever in the presence of americans/english. However, I've
also been told by non-english speaking persons that they really like the way
myself and my wife speak: something to do with clear annunciation or
something.

Anyway, back to the main point: I question whether this is true, because you
can bet I pick up on and have various aesthetic opinions on the various
english accents. I find it very hard to believe that there are not
connotations attached to how various english speakers speak and pronounce
other languages. This would make english some kind of "magical" language that
overcomes social-regional-contextual interpretation, and I simply do not
believe that can be the case. And i know enough american friend's experiences
overseas. I know there were parts/towns of the middle east while travelling I
was advised not to stay in for very long with my accent, and I am well aware
of the general advice for certain american accents to take advantage of the
ambiguity and identify as canadian while travelling.

For the record, the non-exhaustive list of accents I identify and their
subjective opinion are something along the lines of (keeping in mind, I'm not
saying these are my explicit-acted on opinions, they're the subjective-
connotations I recognise them as carrying in my own subculture):

> Californian: loud, extroverted, a little bit of extroverted stupidity,
> annoying.

> New-york: loud, extroverted, annoying in a different way.

> Boston-twang: personally, a bit humorous, not exactly intellectual (park the
> car in the harvard yard)

> Various-southern US: slow, naive but friendly

> English-RP: snooty, but never hear anyone who actually talks like this,
> except on some BBC programs, where sometimes it comes across as a bit
> comical like someone's taking the piss.

> English-other: pretty friendly/approachable in general, obviously can't list
> all the many english-native accents

> Scottish: cool, though stronger ones border on unintelligible until you get
> used to it

> Irish: extremely cool + attractive

> New Zealand: its practically urban-australian except for a handful of fish
> and chips-esque give-aways, basically one of us

> Wog-english (using the term in a friendly way, not as a put-down): generally
> to cover the greek, lebanese, italian accents. Does have lower-middle class
> connotations for better or worse.

~~~
flashman
I think the point there is that an English speaker who learns a second
language doesn't suffer the social stigma of a someone who learns English as a
subsequent language.

(I have a pseudo-scientific theory that the Australian accent's more piercing
qualities are a consequence of having to carry clearly through dense bush. But
a more compelling explanation is that it's an accent of expedience that
accelerated some of the phonetic changes in British English once a small and
socially-mixed group of speakers split off from the main pack.)

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Is that true though?

I mean, there's the obvious point that if you're coming from the in-power
group, its very hard to be "meaningfully stigmatised" by the out-power group
no matter what. You will be identified, but if the other group has little
power, no one from the in-power group really cares. And for better or worse in
the majority of contexts, native english speakers are coming from in-power
groups, and the context of them meeting with people with english as a second
language is going to be usually in the context of dealing with low power
groups and stereotypes.

I, of course, recognise that happens, and that it will be a common occurence
in east/west coast america.

But take the "baka gaijin" phenomenon as a contrasting stereotype for example.
I don't accept that english speakers learning a second language, outside of
the context where the english speaker is just authoritatively in the positive-
power relationship, suffers no social stigma or consequences when trying to
learn a second language.

See also connotations around gringo, bule, laowai, gweilo, etc.

Given that WITHIN english and context there are disparate and conflicting
connotations of having various accents, and that we (and others) can discern
various ethnic and regional cross-language influences, i think its either a
very localised-specific phenomenon (i.e. with the caveat as long as you're
power dominant white english speaking person in the coastal US cities) or
something that can't just generally be held to be true.

