On a pragmatic note, the more of an accent a person has, the harder I need to work to understand them. Also, the more accent, the better quality I need from the phone to understand them.
Voice quality from worst to best:
1. cell phone
2. wired phone
3. Skype
4. in person
My hearing has declined somewhat (too much fooling about with hotrods), making the situation worse.
Another thing I've noticed when listening to a talk show. It's easier to understand the host than the guest, especially when the audio is speeded up. Apparently, a professional host enunciates words better.
I've looked around for a speech coach to improve my enunciation for the presentations I give, but all I could find were autism speech therapists and singing coaches, sigh. (I want to improve my enunciation because the easier it is for people to understand my speech, the more they'll pay attention to my presentation. I know that I sometimes give up listening to a presentation when I have to work too hard to understand the speech.)
I've been doing a lot of video conferencing for work these days (like everyone else) and decided to trash my $5 mike and get a semi pro one so people could hear me clearly.
There is no such thing as "more" or "less" accent from a purely linguistic point of view. You can of course distinguish accents by how close they are to some standard accent, but English doesn't even have a single standard accent.
The idea that "some people have accents, but I speak the pure (or a purer version of the) language" plays right into the notion of accentism.
> There is no such thing as "more" or "less" accent from a purely linguistic point of view.
Bit of a nitpick, but I think that's only true of so-called native accents. [0]
If a community speaks the language natively, in a certain distinctive way, that's called a native accent, and as you say it's meaningless to refer to any native accent as more or less accented than another. (edit I suppose in the extreme cases this might not be true, as a community's dialect might evolve into a distinct language, but that's by the by.)
With non-native accents though, the accent is the result of a limited linguistic ability. If you learn French, you'll have less of an English accent as you become more skilled, as the accent is the result of your native English leaking into your French pronunciation.
At this point, we're moving into meta-debates about the meaning of the word "accent". But the way most linguists understand the way "accent" is just as a pattern of pronunciation, so even with non-native speakers, they don't have "more" or "less" accent, they rather change their accent to a more native-like accent.
case in point: Standard German doesn't pronounce syllable-final "r", so someone who speaks English with a German accent will tend to speak with a non-rhotic accent, as most English accents. If they subsequently move to the US and adopt rhotacism, are they now having "more" or "less" accent?
> There is no such thing as "more" or "less" accent from a purely linguistic point of view.
Pretty sure what the parent meant by "the more of an accent a person has" was "the more a person's accent deviates from my own andthe majority of my community", but wanted to be more concise (if less precise).
I'm guessing you're right, in the context, though, it's not the best shorthand to choose. The unrecognized perception that one's own accent is not actually an accent is the keystone of accentism.
Tho German has standardized variants for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, regulated by the international body of of the Council for German Orthography.
Imho it's also kind of reductive to make "accentism" out as something purely discriminatory, when the matter of fact is that particularly a lot of regional accents are often unintelligible for people who are not familiar with them, even when they are native speakers of the language without ascent.
In Germany one can grow up and live in the middle of a state for their whole lives, and still heavily struggle with understanding the local accent of a smaller nearby town.
And while that is certainly an enrichment on the cultural diversity side to have that many, and so different, accents, it also makes communication more difficult, more prone to fail, thus ultimately more likely for misunderstandings to happen.
There are standardised variants of grammar and orthography, not necessarily of pronunciation. There is a more loose standard (never written down anywhere explicitly I believe, not surprisingly, since who's gonna read a phonetic treatise?) in Germany in terms of pronunciation, which is certainly what most people in the media, try to speak, but you won't have any such luck in Switzerland, neither with actual Swiss German, nor with the way Swiss people pronounce Standard German (it's interesting: I can usually roughly tell where a Swiss person is from when they speak German).
Not understanding, or having more trouble with, certain accents doesn't make you an "accentist", but thinking that this is a fault on the other person's side is.
> In Germany one can grow up and live in the middle of a state for their whole lives, and still heavily struggle with understanding the local accent of a smaller nearby town.
Does this really still happen nowadays?
> And while that is certainly an enrichment on the cultural diversity side to have that many, and so different, accents, it also makes communication more difficult, more prone to fail, thus ultimately more likely for misunderstandings to happen.
Sure, but I guess that's the price you pay for diversity, one I'm personally glad to pay.
> There are standardised variants of grammar and orthography, not necessarily of pronunciation.
It usually directly translates to pronunciation as that's a rather big part of spoken Hochdeutsch.
> Does this really still happen nowadays?
Yes, a lot. Thick Bavarian accents are often considered intelligible in the rest of Germany. Even inside Bavaria dialects can range from "easily understandable" like a lot of Franconian, to something so thick that even other Bavarian's might struggle with understanding, like some regional Upper Palatine dialects.
Often even small towns will have their very own accents.
> Sure, but I guess that's the price you pay for diversity, one I'm personally glad to pay.
I guess I'm just too utilitarian for that, my ideal version of humanity would speak one common language to improve cooperation and understanding among each other.
Dialects are cool and interesting, but there are already so many languages to learn, expecting people to learn a whole bunch of dialects for each of those, in addition to the language itself, is quite an impossible task for the vast majority of people who don't learn languages for a living.
> Yes, a lot. Thick Bavarian accents are often considered intelligible in the rest of Germany. Even inside Bavaria dialects can range from "easily understandable" like a lot of Franconian, to something so thick that even other Bavarian's might struggle with understanding, like some regional Upper Palatine dialects.
Somewhat related story about Swiss German, although it is more of a dialect than accent.
I self-studied German for two years - Duolingo, consuming a lot of German media, chatting via video with different speakers online. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on basic conversational skills.
When I finally went to Germany for the first time, I had a connecting flight in Zurich on Swiss Air. After boarding the flight I realized I could hardly understand anyone. Most of the staff and passengers were speaking Swiss German. I panicked a good part of the flight about my misplaced confidence in my fluency.
Luckily on the trip through Germany I had no problem with Hochdeutsch. However there definitely were very noticeable differences in accent and word usage as I moved from Schleswig-Holstein in the north to Bayern in the south via the east.
> It usually directly translates to pronunciation as that's a rather big part of spoken Hochdeutsch.
Not really, since there are lots of small pronunciation differences (e.g. the pronunciation of "ä", the quality of "i" in words like "Kirche", etc.) that are not distinguished in writing. At the same time, some "Bühnenhochdeutsch" pronunciations are not even captured by orthography, e.g. syllable-final -ig being pronounced as -ich or the voicing of the s sound before vowels at the syllable onset. In fact, especially with phenomena such as reduction of "-er" etc. in standard German, Swiss people will usually claim that they speak "German as it is written" even though that is wildly different from how most Germans speak.
Also, I mean, modern German and its orthography was modeled in large parts after Saxon, but nobody would think nowadays that Saxon constitutes "standard German" in terms of pronunciation.
> Yes, a lot. Thick Bavarian accents are often considered intelligible in the rest of Germany. Even inside Bavaria dialects can range from "easily understandable" like a lot of Franconian, to something so thick that even other Bavarian's might struggle with understanding, like some regional Upper Palatine dialects.
> Often even small towns will have their very own accents.
But that wasn't your claim. You claimed that dialects are unintelligible from town to town which is usually very rare, since dialects tend to form a continuum.
> I guess I'm just too utilitarian for that, my ideal version of humanity would speak one common language to improve cooperation and understanding among each other.
That's not a linguistic question anymore, but one of personal values. However, it is worth noting that cases of language death often are accompanied by culture death as well, and deep feelings of shame and guilt within the respective communities.
Saarbrücken, the barely moderate-size city I studied at in Germany, has three distinct dialects. It lies right on the French border. At least one dialect has heavy French influence and one does not.
Most of the local students I talked to spoke German that was very close to Hochdeutsch plus some linguistic peculiarities and slang terms. As far as I could tell this was the dialect they used at home, when drunk, talking with childhood friends, etc., and I could understand it easily.
Every once in a while, though, I would meet someone (usually of a slightly older generation) whose dialect I found completely unintelligible.
I'm not sure how easily the average local German could understand the different dialects. Most of the local people I talked to regularly were computational linguist students, German teachers, or worked in the international student office, so they had a particular interest in learning languages.
Not a direct answer to your question, but I live in the Netherlands which is a lot smaller than Germany, about 300x200 km. Every village has their own accent/dialect and every region often has their own words or even sub-language. I live 50km from Fryslan, but I cannot make any sense of Frysian language. The same for Limburg or Flanders when people have a deep accent.
Sometimes people with such a strong accent get on tv, and they provide subtitles, otherwise it is just incomprehensible to most Dutch people. It is often a culture of relating to someone, like "We are from the same background". At my chess club there are 3 persons that know Frysian, when they decide to talk Frysian, it is better to just walk away :)
Frisian isn't too relevant to a discussion of Dutch accents, because Frisian is universally considered to be a different language than Dutch. After all, Frisian and Dutch split off from their common ancestor already in the first millennium AD.
It may not list it as an alternative English spelling, but the page for the main dialect of Frisian does indicate that the language's own name for itself is spelled with a Y.
English is not my first language, so when I speak, people don’t always understand me. Sometimes I have to repeat words more slowly, or replace words with synonyms. This happens because I do not pronounce the words in the way people around me expect to hear.
The explanation above is somewhat long, so I would like to shorten this. I have been saying “I have an accent” instead.
Is “accent” the right word to use in this case? If not, which word is?
> I do not pronounce the words in the way people around me expect to hear.
This is an interesting way of putting it - an accent is a collection of linguistic tendencies that together can clue a listener in on your social class, geographical origin, or other biographical information. However, I think it is possible to make a distinction between "having an accent" and simply mispronouncing words. Stressing the wrong syllable is an example of the latter. Both having an accent and mispronouncing words can lead to misunderstandings, but one is easily correctible and the other is not.
"I have an accent" as a kind of shorthand for "I have a non-standard accent" is in theory fine, since most people know what you mean.
The reason I pointed it out, though, is because the reverse direction - "you have an accent, which is why I don't understand you" - especially when directed at actual native speakers implies (even if not intended) some sort of deficiency on the part of the interlocutor.
You basically said "everyone has an accent", and this is true. Regarding understandable English though, some accents are MUCH harder to understand than others.
My perspective is that, for most talks in English, the speaker would want to be understood by native speakers of American English.
I do assume (and believe correctly), that the further an accent strays from what you would hear on your standard American news channel, the more difficult it is for the average native speaker of American English to understand.
To your point about the difficulty of finding a good coach to train enunciation, you should look for a parallel track. A trite example is the scene from Pumping Iron where Schwarzenegger takes ballet classes to help improve his posing. You want someone who can train you in an area that requires the same skills but for a different purpose. I would look to stage acting where the performer is required to speak clearly and forcefully enough that a large audience can understand what they are saying while still maintaining control over their voice. Maybe a Shakespearean acting coach could help you.
Agree on all fronts. As a non-British person living in England, some local accents are nightmarishly different from the basic "international English". For example, I absolutely love Irish and Scottish people, their history, their culture, their traditional attitudes etc etc, but when they "go thick-accent" I can't fucking understand half of what they're saying. I feel like the Robin Williams sketch on landing in Scotland.
> decided to trash my $5 mike and get a semi pro one
Did the same, and also got decent headphones, and it made a ton of difference on both sides - people understand me better and I understand them better. Some people are so impressed they actually ask how I get to "sound so good".
I dread to answer my landline phone now, I keep it working just for emergencies.
I know that acting lessons often have enunciation training. That's partially why there is a "TV accent" that's more or less regarded as the standard US accent.
As a non-native English speaker, I've found that the best way to make myself understandable is to enunciate the consonance clearly. It sounds weird sometimes, and clearly not native, but it's always clear.
Another thing I've trained myself to do is the control of rhythm and stresses. I got this idea from a book on poetry, which classified English as a stress-timed language. Coming from a mother tone of Chinese, I'm not used to grouping rhythm centered on stress syllables. For me, stresses used to live just within an English word, as notated by the dictionary.
When I started to pay attention to a sentence-level flow of stresses, I finally understand how English speaking people gloss over some syllables and emphasize on others. I've even noticed that many eloquent speakers naturally slip into a iambic pentameter when they talk.
Regarding speech understanding: I think even in everyday situations, we rarely understand other people 100% and derive the missing bits via context. I watched a lot of movies in the English original with English subtitles over the past years, and because of that, I am now used to be able to understand movie conversations 100%. Whenever I watch a movie in my native language (without subtitles), I sometimes have to pause and replay a scene to fully understand the dialogue. Sometimes it is virtually impossible, as the actor just mumbles a few syllables. When I ask other people watching with me what the actor just said exactly, they usually also don't have a clue, but it doesn't seem to bother them. Usually, the answer is something like "he certainly meant A, because B just did C, and now he is excepting D".
I’ve been watching a lot of tech YouTube during the lockdown to play with new languages and the accent (and audio quality) tax on me as a listener is real. If I’m trying to learn something from you and it’s mentally hard to start with, if I have to burn extra cycles replaying what I heard to extract the words, I’m going to get a lot less out for the time and effort I put in.
It’s in some ways akin to trying to read content with constant pop-up ads obscuring the message and needing my attention to dismiss.
You might look into drama coaches that give elocution lessons. I imagine that the skills are fairly similar.
I used to do a bit of drama and choir and I found the warmup exercises to be helpful for enunciation and such. A brief warmup before a meeting might be a good idea too. The major downside is that it looks and sounds ridiculous, but it will limber up the muscles in your mouth and face.
Regarding voice clarity on smartphones, it’s quite terrifying to see the difference in audio quality (recorded or during calls) from one instant message app to another, on the same phone.
For example, from worse to best:
- wechat
- WhatsApp
- Threema
- Voice memo.
How are other apps scoring at this? (Telegram / Skype / Naver / etc.)
> the more of an accent a person has, the harder I need to work to understand them.
Implicit in this statement is the (incorrect) assumption that you yourself don't have an accent. It makes no sense to complain about people having "a lot" of accent.
The quoted statement of fact does not imply that the poster believes himself to have no accent. The implication in this statement is the (plainly true) assumption that from the perspective of a listener, the greater difference a speaker has to their own dialect is what is always meant by 'more' of an accent.
Furthermore, the presence of several dialects does not preclude there being a 'central' dialect, with 'less' of an accent, being most easily understood by all- eg the columbus oh 'midland' accent being the traditional american 'radio standard' for its neutrality and strong general pronunciation.
I can't imagine that the voice quality is the same, given things like VoLTE and WiFi calling basically turning cellphones into VOIP systems. I feel like this is one of those things where the improvements were so gradual that you don't recognize them happening. But, if you actually talked to someone on a 30 year old cell phone and network, you would maybe wonder that you ever thought that was clear.
So I think the speaker and microphones probably were better in the older phones, at least as I recall them.
But "HD Voice"[1] as they call it here is really noticeable for me, and with earbuds or similar it's quite good. It's quite apparent when I'm out in the forest and it drops out due to poor signal level.
I am not so sure: according to Wikipedia, Skype uses SILK, which has bitrate of 6-60 kbit/s [0]. In contrast, G.711 (often used for classic landline telephones) has a bitrate of 64 kbit/s [1].
I can only speak from personal experience: my cheap standard landline has much better audio quality and lower delay times than any Skype call I have made.
Bitrate only tells a little bit of the story. There are high pass and low pass filters, audio compression, data compression, latency, error correction and a number of other things at play with these codecs to hit a desired bitrate with the goal of maximizing for highest legibility over unreliable connections. This leads to a number of compromises; in the case of Skype this means you can have huge variance in quality, and landlines are consistent but incredibly limited in reproducible bandwidth and dynamic range.
Is this bitrate comparison an "apples to apples" comparison?
I know when talking about audio compression in the frame of music reproduction AAC 256Kb/s is similarly performant to MP3 320Kb/s - and I think there are better performing audio codecs still.
A wired phone (POTS) doesn't have "bit rate", it has bandwidth. It could very well be that VOIP uses a lower bitrate than Skype, or Skype uses a better algorithm, but I would lump VOIP in the "Skype" category, not the "wired phone" category.
A wire phone (POTS) definitely does have a "bit rate". The entire POTS back-end system is digital, and each circuit gets 8000 8-bit samples per second, or 64kbps, uncompressed.
I do know that POTS is analog (at least the wire to my house is, I presume at some point it becomes digital), not digital, but the larger point stands.
Nyquist's theories (and Shannon's sampling theorem based on it) only concerned themselves with the time-based discretization of analog signals. As Shannon showed, to accurately reconstruct a signal of bandwidth x, you need to take samples at a constant frequency of 2x.
But when speaking of digital signals, discretization is only half the story. The other part of the story is quantization, i.e. how many bits to use to represent each sample. And that amplitude quantization is a lossy operation, regardless of Shannon's theorem about discretization in the time domain. You can't simply say that an analog signal of 40kHz therefore has a bitrate of 80kbps -- using just one bit to represent each sample will not accurately reproduce the original analog waveform, unless the original waveform was a square wave (and you would still need that bit of information to accurately reconstruct it).
So what, then, is the bitrate of a discretized, analog signal? It is still infinite, because the amplitude of every sample can be any element of R! Only once you decide on a quantization resolution, i.e. once you determine your acceptable level of signal loss, can you speak of "the bitrate of an analog signal".
But that bitrate is only an approximation of the original signal, Shannon notwithstanding.
I'm an engineer, I can't help but solve problems. For example, while the Iraq war was going on and soldiers were getting killed by IEDs, I kept designing a vehicle in my head to be resistant to such infernal devices. The armored vehicle designers likely know how to do this far better than me, but I couldn't help it.
But maybe not. I bought a Generac generator the other day, and the controls on it are so horribly designed I want to scream. It isn't horrible because they saved money, it is pointlessly, stupidly bad, and Generac has been making generators forever. It baffles me.
In New Zealand, we're so young and small that we only have one distinctive regional accent - the Southland accent, typified by a rolling R - as typified in someone fresh in Christchurch telling you that they're from Gorrrre[1].
(As a South Islander, I can often, but not always, tell that a Pakeha (NZ European) person is from the North Island because they have more of a Polynesian influence in their pronunciation - South Island being notoriously white for the most part, the difference is slight but noticeable).
The Gore escapees get lightly teased about it "Hey Sharon tell us how far you went to the bar in your car" etc., but otherwise treated the same as other Kiwis.
"Accentism" as described seems to require a long history of a rural peasantry / working class and an urbanised middle - upper class - in other words, it's just a proxy for class based discrimination.
I guess we're lucky that talking like a farmer isn't considered an impediment to being Prime Minister... so far, although I still put it down to not even being a 200 year old bicultural country.
That said, in the past, speaking in the Received Pronunciation was mandatory for newsreaders etc., and people correctly pronouncing Maori names and place names etc. is still an ongoing slow improvement.
Most of the world can't tell Kiwi and Aussie accents apart. Australians can, though, and any spotted Kiwis overseas will be subjected to ribbing about fush and chups and teen dollars, some of it courtesy of taxpayer dollars: https://youtu.be/3cPs2SzShNc
Also, I've heard that the Southland rolled R comes from Scottish, since there was a significant Scot presence there as exemplified by Dunedin (the Scottish name for Edinburgh).
New Zealand might not have regional accents but it does have sociolects with accompanying stereotypes which in the context of this article amounts to the same thing.
Exactly. Shazza the bogan has a completely different accent from bro Rangi, who sounds completely different to classy old Muriel; while farmer Jim has yet another clearly different accent. I think the differences between these accents are broadening over time i.e. I think social clique accents have got stronger.
Hmm, yes I'd agree to that extent, I guess I can't comment on how widespread discrimination based on that stuff is.
I mean, I went to a private school (for a year, and then they kicked me out) with people whose parents specially sent to them to a primary school that deliberately taught its own distinct accent[1], so I would imagine there's areas of Christchurch social life and/or commerce that are contingent on that.
But then I know there's already discrimination based on which school old boy/girl tie you wear (if any) in those same circles, and there were plenty of "bro Rangi" and "farmer Jim" at that school with me who ended up with that tie, and likewise ended up doing well in their professional life in firms filled with people from that same school.
So maybe the accent doesn't matter so much in those 'elite' circles so much as the money and the people you know. We don't really have an old money / new money divide in NZ, unless you take members of the First Four Ships Association seriously (pro-tip, only members of the FFSA take them seriously).
I was going to ask if New Zealand was big enough to develop its own regional accents, but I just realized that it's significantly bigger and less densely populated that England. And since England managed to develop a lot of distinct regional accents, I assume that given a century or two there might be a lot of New Zealand accents.
Ireland has literally hundreds of accents with a population of less than 7 million. And that's not an exaggeration. Many Irish people can identify the specific town another Irish person is from based on their accent. I went to school in the largest town that hasn't achieved city status, Drogheda, and I could identify individual estates.
When I was growing up in Scotland I could easily tell if someone was from one of the coastal fishing villages or lived on a farm inland - the latter would have distinctly different accent even though though they might only be a couple of kilometres from where I grew up.
I think calling it a "rolling R" is misleading, since it's actually an approximant, /ɹ/.
The term "rolling" or "rolled" usually refers to trills, /r/ or /ʀ/, which no New Zealand dialect has as far as I can tell. Although feel free to correct me, this is just what I could gather from googling it.
In Germany, this also has a long tradition. People were making fun of Richard Wagner's Saxon dialect for all of his life. When Schiller held lectures, students would later complain that they did not understand anything because he always spoke Swabian. When I was in school, parents that weren't originally from the area complained that their children couldn't follow the physics class because our teacher had a thick Swabian accent.
Where I come from (southwestern part of the country), you can book courses to lose your local Swabian accent to increase your chances on the national job market [0].
> you can book courses to lose your your local Swabian accent to increase your chances on the national job market
Are there courses for newcomers to learn Swabian so they can fit in better with local society and improve their chances on the regional job market? (I'd guess that there aren't, because the market for Standard German education is much bigger.)
There are certainly books for Germans who emigrate to Switzerland about learning Swiss German (which is somewhat close to Swabian), because Swiss people reverse-discriminate: if you speak either Standard German, or any non-Swiss German accent / dialect, you will be treated with distrust (some people will be more tolerant of Austrians or South Germans, though). At the same time, if you try to speak Swiss German but don't so perfectly, people will also think you're being ridiculous. /shrugs (source: grew up in Switzerland)
If you are trying to find a manufactoring job or want to work as a craftsman, than speaking the dialect is definitely an advantage. In higher level jobs, not so much. But to really teach the dialect we would have to agree on a "standard" version, which would be very hard, as the dialect is highly regional and there is strong accentism within the dialect. The safest bet would be to live in Stuttgart for a few years, here you get a light mix of all the variants and Standard German.
But as in any language, perfectly learning a dialect as nearly impossible even for a native speaker. I can understand and imitate Swiss German, but only because it's the same dialect family (Alemannic German).
The way I understand it, linguistic standardization is a modern and artificial process. Even such seemingly scientific and well determined concepts such as language or dialect are in fact arbitrary distinctions imposed on a continuous phenomenon.
In this light, you could say that there's essentially no such thing as the 'right' accent. Whatever is considered standard is simply a reflection of the power structures that currently dominate a society, e.g. if the South had won the Civil War, it's entirely possible that today people would have been making fun of Yankees and their 'hick' accents.
These observations are in line with the spirit of the article. I however disagree with its sort-of conclusion:
> [...] the future belongs to the privately-educated head of HR lecturing you about the latest initiative in Diversity and Inclusion.
"Accentism" can be overcome by first overcoming class and power differences - not easy, but not impossible either.
Heh -- a fun little thing about moving to England is that loads of people use the work "reckon" here in everyday conversation; whereas in the US that would stereotypically be part of a "hick" accent.
> The way I understand it, linguistic standardization is a modern and artificial process.
It may be partially artificial, but I don't see how it could be considered "modern". I'm no linguistics or history expert, but it seems to me there has always been two things in tension: forces which push for unification, and forces which push for diversification.
For unification: On the one hand, there's obviously an advantage to having a common language everyone speaks. 2000 years ago in the Mediterranean it was Greek; 1000 years ago in Europe it was Latin, 800 years ago in the ME / North Africa it was Arabic, etc.
Also, there are advantages to having larger groups of people working together; one way of getting people to work together is to have a shared identity; one way to have a shared identity is to have a shared language. And so one way to grow your power is to unify larger areas (either via annexation or conquest) and then get the areas to have a similar language (either by education / persuasion or suppression). And the most natural way for the powers that be to "unify" a language is to declare the one spoken in the capital city as the official standard.
For the diversification side: It's very natural for language to evolve; and the larger number of people speak a language, the more difficult it is for everything to evolve in the same direction. This means that local areas or local groups are naturally going to "drift".
And once they do drift, then identity comes into play in the opposite ways. It's beneficial for leaders of a large area if everyone has the same identity; but there's an opposite attraction for individuals to identify as part of a smaller, distinct group; and thus to emphasize or even push for the diversification of the local dialect.
> In this light, you could say that there's essentially no such thing as the 'right' accent.
One thing I have noticed is that "prestige dialects", as they're sometimes called, have had people go through the language and "revise" it to make it more "rational". After studying Mandarin for several years, I started studying Cantonese; and it's pretty clear that Mandarin has had a lot more effort from people put into it to revise it and make it consistent, whereas Cantonese is much more spoken, and thus a lot more "quirky" in lots of ways.
The "no double negative" rule in English is an example of this sort of thing. Many languages have "agreement", where the whole sentence is either negative or positive; "Je n'ai jamais" in French could literally be translated "I not have never"; but in French it's not a double negative, it's just "agreement". English used to be exactly the same way (you can read educated people speaking unabashedly with double negatives in, say, the court of Henry VIII); but at some point some clever people decided that it would be much more rational if two negatives made a positive. That became the "prestige dialect", and the "common" people who spoke English the way their ancestors had for hundreds of years were then looked down on for being uneducated and speaking English "incorrectly".
So yes, you can't say Mandarin or the Chicago Manual of Style's version of English is "right"; but it's quite probable that they are more consistent than the alternatives (though perhaps less florid or interesting as a result).
> "Je n'ai jamais" in French could literally be translated "I not have never"; but in French it's not a double negative, it's just "agreement".
In that particular spot, I'd say a more correct literal translation is "I not have ever." Jamais in the absence of ne tends to be more equivalent to "ever", and I would guess that the etymology of "never" is that it's a contraction of "not ever".
You could also argue that the French grammar isn't a double negative. Ne functions like a linguistic particle that introduces a negative phrase, and then the kind of negation is indicated by the subsequent pas, rien, jamais, etc.
Why I'm bothering to dig into this is, that same "prestige dialect" sort of debate functions differently in French. The ne is disappearing from informal spoken French. The French Academy isn't too happy about this; their official position on the subject (which I'll paraphrase - I'm feeling too lazy to hunt it down and translate it) is that words like pas, rien, and jamais have no negative character of their own, so omitting the ne renders the sentence nonsensical.
(To which I suspect any practicing linguist would respond, "Huh? If it's nonsensical, then how come people who speak this way can understand each other perfectly?" But that kind of distressingly pragmatic attitude is exactly why practicing linguists don't get elected to the Academy. I imagine they'd sooner admit une écrivaine.)
> it seems to me there has always been two things in tension: forces which push for unification, and forces which push for diversification.
Agreed. I'm also not a linguist, but it does seem to me that the forces pushing for unification are more societal or statal, while those pushing for diversification are just kind of the natural state of things. Before large scale (somewhat) centralized societies emerged (so before the agricultural revolution) there are still many tens of thousands of years when language was completely non-standardized, strictly spoken and extremely diverse.
I think that may be verifiably false. If I speak French with a heavy English accent (as in pronounce the words as I would in English, not with what is commonly thought of as an "accent from England") any native French speaker will have a hard time understanding me and likewise non-native French speakers who have learned to understand words as they are pronounced in French. What you are proposing would amount to the creation of a new creole but that in itself is a systematized blending of more than one language by a large group of people. You really can't get away from standards when it comes to communication. So much depends on the ability to reliably reproduce sounds that can be easily interpreted by others to mean the same things that you intended when speaking.
> You really can't get away from standards when it comes to communication.
I disagree, at least in principle. It's important to separate the natural phenomenon of language, which has been going on for perhaps 100000 years or so, from the general understanding of the term.
In the general sense language indeed has to be standardized, because that's what is needed to have a functional nation-state that has (ideally) high internal homogeneity. Nation states are however a modern and artificial construct. If you go back a few thousand years (or even a few hundred in some places) you will see much more of a continuous distribution of languages [1]. Even today you can see traces of this in, for example, the Western Romance languages [2].
Again, in the natural sense of the word, there isn't even a clear separation between languages. It's all a continuum of different ways of speaking that flow into each-other.
If you read the first link you gave you'll find several instances explaining that while dialects from nearby locales are understandable, ones from further away eventually become unintelligible. Nation states emerged after the improvement of transport first with rebuilding of road systems and then with further developments in technology that made it possible for more people to travel further. The development of so many dialects was a direct result of people not travelling anymore causing those populations to become isolated and diverge linguistically. The re-emergency of reliable travel necessitates standardization of language since you can't be expected to learn every dialect within an area governed by a single body. Using Romance languages goes completely against your point since they are all offshoots of the OG standardized language.
Anecdata: as a Texan from a rural town currently working in software in Seattle, I've had multiple experiences with this. People assume my political views or agenda far before they know me. Luckily I don't believe it has impacted my actual job search thus far.
To everyone here feeling bad about their southern accents, I'm just gonna say this: as an immigrant, I LOVE those accents. I wish I could just adopt one, but that would sound fake as hell, unfortunately. So I'm putting my accent reduction efforts into sounding more like someone from the West Coast, which I understand to be fairly neutral.
The southern accent thing is very relatable to me, as in my own country (Brazil) I have a very distinct southern accent too (I grew up in a rural area like many folks here).
I've had to confront my southern accent a few times in my life to get taken seriously. Moving from rural North Carolina to attend college in Chapel Hill, I had to "scrub the rural from my voice." When I went to graduate school in New York, I tried my best to coach myself to a "flat American accent," which carried me well through the midwest when I later moved to Ohio.
One of the small joys of my life right now is working with folks with thick accents in positions of seniority. At my previous job, we had a chief scientist who also came from NC. At one point, he told me that he'd suppressed his accent until he was promoted past the level where anyone could judge how he said things instead of what he said.
Likewise. So many American accents are just awful nasally things. I actually can't stand listening to half the courses on Coursera for example. The southern accent is so much easier on the ear.
> ...putting my accent reduction efforts into sounding more like someone from the West Coast, which I understand to be fairly neutral.
Ever since I was a child, others have observed that I speak in a remarkably Broadcast English accent (it was usually described as "you have no accent at all", or "you sound just like the news reporters"). That "neutral American accent" you are after is called General American English, and is still an evolving area [1]. The West Coast lends some of its artifacts to this neutral accent, but General American English is an ambiguous kind of a prestige accent that stands relatively apart from its constituent regional accents.
In daily work however, I determined in my use cases that careful enunciation and appropriate vocabulary for my audience (especially for public speaking) count for far more to obtain engagement and active involvement than my accent. The enunciation part required careful, conscious effort in everyday settings before it could take root as a habit in my consulting work, and led to noticeable sales engagement improvement; I wasn't well-off enough at the time to afford a speech coach.
Ironically, I'm horrible at understanding thick accents myself, currently training myself to get better at that skill by listening to YouTube videos and engaging my coworkers with thick accents over audio chats instead of text chats. It takes a tremendous amount of my attention to parse thick accents, while others seem to take them in stride.
Adding my anecdote to this, I had an interesting experience when my kid did some voice over work for a couple of studios in Bangkok. I grew up in southern California and apparently have that West Coast or news broadcaster accent, which my kid has picked up. And that's what the studios wanted. One was for a Singapore TV kid's show where one of the main actors spoke English with what I guess you would call a Singapore accent. The producer wanted to replace that. Another was a cartoon for Indonesian TV. In both cases they wanted the "neutral American accent".
Haha, last year I was seeing a lady who was from California, migrated out here to Texas, and I ran into the same thing.
I'm actually from Mississippi, so I have an even thicker accent than all but the most rural Texans, and while we were dating, she interjected during one of our talks about politics and life, with, "I could listen to you talk for hours...".
I was genuinely flattered. When I asked why, it as much the same reasoning you gave. I apparently have peculiar word choices that, when combined with an advanced education and a wide and diverse range of interests, causes a lot of cognitive bias in those who hear me speak.
A funny story I tell from time to time, is that I was with a company as the CTO that was acquired by a huge conglomerate with headquarters in Spain, so we had a lot of Spaniards that would come over to work for 6 month to several years. Anyways, one of them, Valentine was the CTO and my Spanyard counterpart. Soon this game began among several of the Spaniard executives to see who could learn obscure US colloquialisms and use them in conversation. That being said, the south has a master on them in spades. So me and one of my senior developers set about to teaching Valantine southern colloquialisms. Which would sometimes come out of his mouth hilariously wrong. Anyways, Valentine and myself end up late to a meeting one day and some decision were made that neither of us agreed with and Valentine says listen you carpetbagging hornswogglers, that dog is not going to hunt (translation, you untrustworthy, scheming people, that idea is stupid and it's not going to work). You could see the absolute defeat on the other Spaniard execs faces. It was a hilarious interaction, in which the other execs where trying to get me to cough up some colloquialisms they could use.
I never suppressed my accent in my career and have done well for myself. That being said, there have been occasions where I could tell I was in a room full of people who assumed I was a dumb southerner. That was to their detriment not mine.
As a side note, I did teach myself how to speak in a completely mid-atlantic accent which is pretty cool because it's not a real accent so nobody knows where you are from. If you want to teach yourself an accent, I would suggest learning mid-atlantic, as you will never run across a native speaker, it will throw people off and strike up a lot of conversation.
It's funny but accents, at least in native language are actually fairly fungible. If someone takes the effort, they can easily fake an accent to fairly realistic abilities so long as they are familiar with the dialect. I can fake a Italian/Brooklyn accent to fairly decent accuracy as most native English speaking Americans are able to. It might not fool a Brooklyn native, but it is good enough to fool the average American. We can thank Rocky Balboa for that. I can fake most southern accents to the extent that I can fool native speakers, but unless you are intricately familiar with the region it is hard to fool natives because there are usually hyper-dialects, I can tell where a person is from if they are from the south based on the southern accent. Yet, most people out of the south cannot tell the difference. For example, a Texas draw from the Old Florida draw, I can tell because I am from Florida, I have it and I get asked if I am from Texas all the time, yet I know when someone is from Texas as it is different in it's inflections. As well Georgia and Alabama are distinct from North Carolina and Tennessee wheras Mississippi is a mix, get too far north and they sound like Tennessee, east and it sounds like Alabama, south west and it sounds like Cajun, but it blends and that is how you can tell they are from Mississippi because they will use colloquialisms from other local accents.
The article appears to be mostly discussing regional accents, but I've noticed the same thing with international accents as well. In America, European accents are seen very positively - even for ESL speakers such as the French or Germans. In contrast, Asian accents are perceived far more negatively. I've literally met Asian colleagues who have enrolled in "accent elimination" classes, for this reason. It's unfortunate that anyone should feel belittled because of their accent.
It’s really hard to overcome. I seem to have an ingrained negative association with Indian accents, despite some of my favorite colleagues being Indian. I have to actively combat this in myself, but it is ever-present. The opposite is true of most European accents.
I grew up in the US south. Many of the brightest, kindest, most well-rounded people I’ve ever met had thick to medium southern accents. And yet, when I hear a thick southern accent, the person drops significantly in my initial estimation of them.
Some folks have used their accent to their advantage. One of the best lawyers I know comes across as a bumpkin due to his accent. So, he uses the element of surprise (dropping really clever rhetorical lines) extremely well.
At a previous job, one of the best developers had a thick accent. When I interviewed him, he wore a cammo hat. I would have rejected him if not for one of my favorite colleagues insisting that he was one of the best devs he’d worked with. That experience has made me put a checklist in place for my interview assessment process.
I wish none of the above was true of me, but there it is. I just have to learn to work around it.
I have a fairly heavy southern accent and have dealt with the issue from time to time, but you don't really see the discrimination against it as much as long as you are in the south. Outside of the south it is a different ball game.
I have a friend who is also an investor that has done really well for himself. His name is Jeff and we were in a venture together and I always wondered how this guy ever became a billionaire, think Barny Fiffe as an investor. Anyways, our venture ends up getting sued by a large company and we have to go to court and all of the sudden this guy becomes Matlock I mean he is absolutely shredding the other legal team, all the while maintaining his charade of please explain that to a dumb southern boy who does not understand all of this.
Anyways, the case is over and I say to him, I think after all these years I just met the real Jeff and he says you have always know the real Jeff as I don't try to deceive people, people deceive themselves by projecting onto me their stereotypes, I just never tried to adapt myself to their model of who I should be, therefore they underestimate me to their own disadvantage. That was the day I learned that being underestimated is actually an advantage and that most people conflate arrogance with confidence. In reflection Jeff was confident he just was not arrogant, arrogance was the weakness he exploited.
As a side note Bill Clinton is another example of using his southerness as a trap for the arrogant to fall into. He was a master at using it to lule his political opponents into underestimating him.
> One of the worst things about Zoom, a friend in finance tells me, is not being able to pick up the status signals and thereby knowing who you can ignore in a meeting.
Man, I'd be tempted to make Zoom compulsory then... Imagine a world where people have to discuss ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments, rather than relying on behind-the-scenes class-solidarity pacts and other unfair arrangements to dismiss the hoi polloi...
I would assume that the organisation or business works as before where decisions and work happens according to some kind of existing hierarchy and that doesn't change because they have adopted video conferencing.
Thus, meetings in Zoom are not discussing ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments, but just a continuation of the existing ways of working. We can then say that, as far as getting work done, a meeting in Zoom is just like a meeting in real life, and as with meetings face to face there are times when things are said which will be ignored. (Ideally we would want our business to work where all information is being assessed logically, but in reality, people are not that logical!).
Video conferencing makes picking up on who is ignoring what harder, it doesn't make the what less easy to ignore. People will still be able to say things, it's just harder for others to notice the reaction of other people are to each other. People are free to react to other people and information, it's just harder to work out how others are reacting to that.
I wouldn't say it's the worse thing about Zoom at all and there are many positives but I can understand that there are some negatives to video conferencing. Humans often communicate many things non verbally. One obvious example would be seeing who is looking at who in real life, where all we now is everyone looking at each other equally.
edits:
It's worth pointing out that the article is about accents being subtle status signals but the anecdote is about social/power status in meetings where accents would be a bad signal.
We all notice and respond to status signals, whether consciously or unconsciously.
To think that it's even possible to have a system where, "people have to discuss ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments" is pretty naive in my opinion.
Social connections and influence will always play a role in things. I'm certain that person will come up with a new heuristic for detecting status over Zoom if it becomes a permanent aspect of their job.
The mention of finance is a giveaway that the author thinks the same as you. UK finance people are stereotyped as being terrible persons, often not without reason...
The thing is, most of the language courses I've ever been on do not focus on pronounciation. They'll get you to close enough, but not correct your errors beyond that. Same seems to be the case for my kid's language courses.
I don't think it would be that hard to get the pronounciation right in most languages, but it's just not emphasised in favour of grammar and vocab.
As for English accents, I find that one of the more charming things about this country. People aren't going to say you don't aren't native if you sound Liverpudlian, Australian, or American. By contrast in more localized languages people sniff a foreigner immediately on a missed vowel or wrong article.
And yet, I'm sure there's some way to learn pronunciation well.
I worked with a woman that was born in India, learned English with a British accent, and then learned American English and lives in the US.
The first time she switched to British accent I was gobsmacked. Then she switched to her native language (I don't remember which) and she clearly had a native accent fro that.
And then she switched back to US accent and I couldn't tell it wasn't native, too.
How did she learn? I wish I had asked her. It just seemed rude to ask at the time. She was very nice and obviously trusted us enough to show her accents, so it probably would have been fine to ask. Oh well.
If you have some incentive, you can get the practice. For instance, the Danish princesses have pretty good accents, having come from IIRC Hong Kong, France, and Australia.
It's not that the information is secret, it's just not a focus. I had a Mandarin teacher who was very good at explaining exactly what shape to make with your mouth/tongue for each sound. There's gotta be a summary for most languages somewhere, I just haven't found them.
I recall a documentary from years ago about training in Indian call centers, and they'd have experts come in to train people in accents on a regular basis. Presumably due to the amount of call center outsourcing that's done in the western world there are more resources available in India than other places when it comes to accent coaching.
Many people are not really interested in having perfectly native-like pronunciation. You really need to have a strong motivation to practice a particular accent, something that e.g. actors or sometimes even singers might have, but the regular person just "wants to be understood".
I say this as someone who regularly tries to speak as native-like as possible in any language he learns, but that's certainly not the norm.
I think that depends where you are. I'm a Londoner, and I can generally pick out who is or isn't a native speaker, but I don't remark on it. Lots of people here aren't native English speakers, and all I'd accomplish by pointing that out would be alienating them. I imagine you get a similar feeling in New York or San Francisco, not that I've been to those places.
Conversely, if you go to some parts of the North, people absolutely _will_ remark on it.
That seems like a pretty sweeping generalisation of the North and South. I'm aware that I'm responding to anecdotal evidence with an anecdote myself here, but I come from a fairly small Southern town myself, and I've been harassed here before for "sounding foreign" (my family are Irish, so my accent is a little strange, despite living in England for my entire life). Conversely, having moved to the North for university, no-one's ever remarked on my accent. I don't think this is necessarily a regional thing.
It's a question of whether you're used to encountering foreigners in your daily life. People in big cities and university towns are; people in rural areas less so.
I can think of one example of coming across someone with a very heavy "southern" accent, and what immediately struck me in this instance was the incongruence of his accent juxtaposed with his obvious competence and expertise. It was like being lectured on the finer points of computer science by a cast member of "Moonshiners". That was probably 20 years ago. Now what strikes me is that this is the only example I can think of. That is to say, there was this one guy with a strong southern accent, but how many others were overlooked? Hard to say. That being said, I myself have a slight southern accent, which I was amazed to discover when someone pointed it out. I was like, "wait, what? I have southern accent? No I don't!". But, upon listening to recordings of myself..., yeah, I kind of do. D'oh.
I think you only perceive “incongruence” because of internalized biases you hold.
With respect to other examples, listen to recordings of NASA flight control, especially from the early days of the Space program. I acknowledge that a lot of what you will hear is Texan and not strictly “Southern,” although that itself can be broken down regionally as well. Recordings of engineers at Huntsville US Space and Rocket center also feature Alabaman and other Southern accents.
I have the same feeling when listening to Feynman, who has a strong New York accent. He sounds like a cab driver, not a physicist!
The city vs country accent has a long historical precedent. In the time of Lysistrata, the Spartan accent was the backward sheep-shagging accent. Many english translations replaced the Spartan accent with a Scots accent. In the US it would undoubtedly be a southern accent.
Regional accents in America aren't very common among certain sectors of society. I went to BYU for college, which draws mormons from all over the country, and I could rarely tell where anyone was from. Now I work at Google, and among Americans (well, those actually raised in the states) I can virtually never detect a regional accent.
There's really no need to end it anyway, human love spotting pattern and if it's not accent then it's clothing if it's not material then it's mannerism. We will ALWAYS find something to.. if you're glass half empty kind; find friends from foe. Or if you're glass half full then finding commonalities from others. It's just signal and we're just doing what we do best, pattern matching. What a civilised society should work on is one's behaviour once one believes certain pattern's matched.
Also we should know by now how increasing unreliable stereotyping is becoming in this information overloaded world. People are growing and learning according to their own pace, no longer restricted by their background hence the probability to assume a lot of things about someone by just looking at them is diminishing.
I had to play translator for my ex when we traveled. She was just a little bit hard of hearing but the main thing is that I can start to get the hang of a local accent in a few sentences so I mostly avoid making a fool of myself. She struggles for quite a while.
When you're translating English to English, it takes a bit of diplomacy to do it without insulting or embarrassing either speaker. So when the hotelier asked us if we wanted 2 beds or one, I'd have to turn it into me asking her a question based on their question, and often while I'm myself exhausted and just want to lay down.
"What do you think honey, one queen size or two double beds?"
I once watched a very high level computer science presentation given by a professor with a very heavy, twangy southern drawl. The whole time I struggled with the disconnect between how my mind knew he was very clearly much smarter than I ever hope to be vs. my gut's reaction to his manner of speaking.
Part of our team was in huntsville AL (we're based in massachusetts). We had to interface with them. Really great people. The accents were amusing (to me) for the first couple weeks, but after a while it just stopped. I now associate all UI/UX on unix discussions with southern accents.
I lived in Huntsville for a little bit, and the people there had greatly diminished southern accents compared to the rest of the state. It was super noticeable.
I have this same issue. We are a northern US company and one of our programmers is from the deep south. It is so hard to take him seriously with that accent which I automatically associate with uneducated rednecks. I've literally spent years trying to overcome my bias against the southern accent. One bizarre aspect to this is I was on the interview committee and am the one that convinced everyone else to hire him.
Maybe you overcompensate and the bias is actually in the other direction? It's the subperceptual bias that's the real stinker not the stuff you notice.
I grew up in the rural south, and was explicitly taught that our accent would be perceived this way. It served me well, maybe; I was always aware of my accent and able to camouflage it and eventually lose it almost entirely when I went away to college.
I'm similar in that I learned to hide my west Texas accent pretty well. I've started to embrace my accent more though in that it's always useful when people reveal their prejudices, and I'd rather people take me as I am. Otherwise they're probably not worth my time.
There are situations where it's actually useful though to lay it on thick. My father was an expert at that, particularly after people tried to take advantage of them and he called their bluff, usually playing it up with, "Ya know, I don't know much 'bout this, but I was talkin' with a lawyer friend the other day, and he mentioned something about..."
I grew up in the Deep South. My German immigrant mother used to say "Southerners step on their words before they say them."
I think she genuinely struggled to understand some Southerners. I don't think she was merely being catty.
(I grew up correcting her English pronunciation. I can remember her still pronouncing the silent K on words like knuckles when I was a child. She spoke no English when she met my father.)
This is an internalized bias many hold (I am not criticizing you personally, really just making a diagnostic and/or societal observation).
Anecdote:
I know an executive at a major US biotech originally hailing from South Carolina who dials up the Southern accent to 11 when discussing science in order to mess with people’s heads
As someone who grew up in west Texas, the struggle is real to not sound like a moronic hick. I do a pretty good job, unless I spend any more than a day or two around relatives, then it takes me a couple of weeks to stop the drawl.
Biggest difference for me though, is my regional vocabulary. For example, a refrigerator will always be an icebox for me.
I spent six months working at a FAANG in the bay area after 20 years of living a rural lifestyle in the midwest. I lived in Mountain View and really tried to soak in the difference...I didn't even bother to get a vehicle. That proclamation alone will be cringy for some of you, but it's unthinkable where I live now and where I'd lived every day prior.
At first I felt that I was seeing an environment that is truly 'the future' of integrated multi-culturalism. I just marveled at the fact that on my walk to the store, maybe half of the conversations I overheard were in English. Authentic food and art and music from all over the planet was so accessible, likewise my team was from all over the planet and it was really cool.
Then I realized that I didn't really see any black folks. Anywhere. I mean infosec has a lot of work to do with diversity to be sure, so I wasn't particularly surprised that there was just one black guy on the team. But then I started looking on my way to and from work, at the store, at restaurants, etc. Nada. Then I started getting creeped out, and that one blind spot really started uncovering quite a few more, particularly around the assumptions I was hearing folks make about people that I had direct experience with. This created a Truman Show-esque unraveling and after a while I decided that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. I got somehow disgusted with the place, quit and moved back home.
It's not better here, but at least it's not pretending to be. I'm starting to look at relocating again, but it's not going to be to the west coast. I really hate generalizing and to be clear, there are some amazing folks out there that aren't part of the echo chamber, and the access to a broad cultural base not to mention the weather/natural setting is beyond compare IMHO. But it's just too volatile at the moment and I'm not in a position where it makes sense to basically 'start over' financially for a location that, for the most part, is just overwhelmed with its own pious fantasy.
What I’ve noticed in the Bay Area is a “fetishization” of multi-culturalism; at least amongst the upper-middle class. Lots of “it’s so great our community is diverse”, but then I realized that’s more of “it’s great I can find authentic Mexican food" or "the Chinese New Year Parade is so fun!", but it's pretty apparent by their behavior they are not comfortable with them living in their neighborhood.
Or they’re comfortable with an ethic group in their neighborhood as long as they are firmly Westernized and of a similar socioeconomic class. Outside of that there is very little interest in mixing other than as some fun Sunday leisure activity. Like going to the zoo.
> Or they’re comfortable with an ethic group in their neighborhood as long as they are firmly Westernized and of a similar socioeconomic class.
I believe an acclimatization two-way street is a big factor in successful multicultural co-existence. Food seems to be a powerful bonding agent for many people. My neighbor invites me over for Chinese Moon Festival with mooncakes I've never had before, I invite him over to my hunting lease to shoot some doves and fry them up with bacon. Substitute baba ganoush and BBQ, biryani and buffalo wings, pho and Philadelphia cheesesteak, menudo and Marzetti beef-and-pasta casserole, etc., that's why I love American street parties in multicultural neighborhoods, Americans by and large love sharing with each other at these events. Kids, similar parenting styles arising from similar aspirations and similar ideas on how to achieve those aspirations seem to be another powerful bonding agent.
But I do draw the line somewhere. Much as I love eating it, you can't convince me anyone of any culture will ever be comfortable with their neighbors making stinky tofu in their backyard. I hear even the Chinese impose requirements upon those making stinky tofu to stay away from residential areas.
It’s the same everywhere in the world. You might notice it more in a place with a wider gap or more socioeconomic classes. It’s inevitable for humans to form tribes along those lines, for a variety of reasons.
Oh I agree. There is something hardwired in the human brain to form alliances with other humans “similar to you” - whatever that means. Not necessarily race, but it could be language, socioeconomic status, geography, family lineage, etc. Take your pick.
What annoys me about the Bay Area types I’m talking about is they think they’ve risen above it. They haven’t, they just do it differently.
> but it's pretty apparent by their behavior they are not comfortable with them living in their neighborhood.
> Or they’re comfortable with an ethic group in their neighborhood as long as they are firmly Westernized and of a similar socioeconomic class.
Well this has been a criticism leveled at the Bay Area / "woke" / SJW / whatever-label-you-want-to-use crowd for awhile. Diversity of phenotype and genotype is acceptable. Diversity of viewpoint is not.
LOL! Just one hour ago, a high school kid who grew up here in Silicon Valley was telling me about how ridiculously uninformed his local friends are about Southerners. This kid has visited the south a few times recently and has come back amazed at how friendly, smart, and mannered southerners are. (I agree with his assessment, but I've seen it myself often enough in my own travels that I lump it in with the many no-longer-surprising differences between reality and intellectual fashion. He was confiding in me, because he guessed that I would be one of the few who might understand.)
He has apparently tried to correct his friends' misconceptions a few times, and has been equally amazed at 1) how wrong their ideas of southerners are and 2) how nothing he can tell them has any impact their thinking as they crow about how superior we are to those contemptible southerners, who aren't "tolerant" like we are. (One more LOL for the road....)
I live in Europe and have never visited the States. I think your comment goes some way towards explaining Donald Trump. And probably your next few Republican presidents, I'd guess.
Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks.
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule.
But during National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week,
Lena Horne and Sheriff Clarke are dancing cheek to cheek.
It's fun to eulogize
The people you despise,
As long as you don't let 'em in your school.
Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks,
And the rich folks hate the poor folks.
All of my folks hate all of your folks,
It's American as apple pie.
But during National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week,
New Yorkers love the Puerto Ricans 'cause it's very chic.
Step up and shake the hand
Of someone you can't stand.
You can tolerate him if you try.
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.
But during National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week,
It's National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It's only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!
Ah hail from rural Indianer. Gots ma own achent. Or, at least I used to. Been away from the Midwest long enough that most of it has rubbed off. I don't think I would have reacted any differently before I moved. In the Midwest the only time you'd ever hear such a drawl was in media showing the South from 60+ years ago.
Are you in SF? When I lived in LA, this seemed like far less of an issue than in Northern California, where people seemed incredibly stuck up and generally awful. Something like 40% of LA doesn’t speak English at home and I would imagine a comparable number (if not more) speak with some kind of accent. If you clung to judging people because of their accents, you’d find yourself outside most social circles there.
Not snark at all. I don’t know the connotations because I’m not a Native Californian, but people would comment about how my speaking nasally and apologizing too much (both of which you can find in just about any parody of Midwestern culture).
As a native californian, the only connotation I know of having a Midwest accent is about the sounds.... there is no real characteristic that the accent evokes
I remember in the last handful of decades some great mystery/thriller movies with sophisticated characters where they were using Texan and Louisianan accents (think No Country for Old Men). That, to me, is what made it all the more interesting, although these weren't full on accents by comparison to how people from these places can really speak like.
The most obvious example I've seen of accentism is ABAs referring to people with accents as fobs. I first heard the term from other people my age when I was in grade school, and I've heard it constantly since then. I'm surprised the term hasn't been cancelled yet, given everything else that's going on. I guess it's technically not racist when used by people of the same race/nationality? But it's still gross.
I always found it really weird because it's supposed to denote inferiority due to being an immigrant, but then it's being used by people whose own parents are immigrants with the very accents they're demeaning. But no one will call you a fob if you were born in China, immigrated to the west when you were 10, and don't have an accent. "Dressing fobby" is no longer really a thing as you see plenty of ABAs crossing over fashion-wise, but it used to be something that would get called out.
But if you were born here, left early on in your childhood, and came back with an accent, you'll get labeled, just because of the way you talk.
In Russia people who speak regional accents, are regarded as villagers and face discrimination in Moscow. But, weirdly enough, Moscow accent is also a thing and is mocked by others! Because "true" Russian is spoken in St. Petersburg. Being from there gives person an unfair advantage of being regarded as lightly educated and polished just because of the way he or she speaks.
There's the same thing in English, Queen's English is considered more correct and is indicative of often rural wealthy people who network with similar people and went to prestigious educational facilities. The "Londoner" accent is not considered correct or prestigious.
This seems to be a thing in other English speaking countries as well. In my own country, a Dublin city accent is poorly regarded, and I've heard similar for New York City accents in the US
In Russia, this is because St. Petersburg used to be a capital up until almost the time when language has been standartised (which happened with introduction of the radio in late 1920s - it's been a capital through 1918). Most intellectuals, in a Russian government-centric world, lived in the capital, because it was the only place where things actually happened, so a St.Pete accent was accepted for "correct".
Over 100 years after the revolution, shouldn't the same pattern of aligning with the dialect of the capital have applied in the opposite direction, making Moscow accent the standard and St. Petersburg accent obsolete?
Does St. Petersburg retain a perceived image of superiority for having been built on purpose when Moscow wasn't considered a good enough capital?
Not because of this, but it has a perceived image of (intellectual, cultural and professional, while not economic) superiority because this is the only large city in Russia that has the bulk of its population being actually city dwellers for generations.
See, all other cities have ever been overrun by Nazis with the bulk of their populations evacuating East and never returning (there was nothing to return to), being spread thin over the country and intermixing with villagers, or stayed and then ran away with Germans, or to Germany and then further West (or got caught by Commies in the end of war and sent to gulags or killed), or just simply died during the occupation, or left cities to survive in the countryside. St. Pete on the other hand, was blockaded for most of the war. Around 1/4 to 1/3 of population starved to death, but the rest stayed, wartime migration being minimal. These are the people who lived in the city and had urban professions for many generations, unlike anywhere else in Russia.
Especially not in Moscow, which while never occupied, is now deserted by most Muscovites as they can't compete with millions upon millions of hungry and talented people from the provinces and from whole of ex-USSR, and live elsewhere by renting out their flats. Bulk of today's Moscow is first and second generation urban dwellers...
Completely blind interviews by interactive text chat session only are the closet thing to fair I can conceive; possibly with a shared blackboard or big screen of somekind on provided interview hardware.
I worked for a company that setup "blind" interviews, for the early stage. You'd apply for a position, make up your own alias and would have a "general chat" over IM.
If that went well then you'd have a "real" second/final interview. The system was designed to remove some of the bias from the process, and seemed to work well for that.
We've gone a different route. We give a very easy technical task as the first thing, and everyone that passes it gets an interview. Since we're typically hiring junior devs, this usually extends to "almost-passing" a lot of the time, too. Though, after the recent rounds of interviews and someone who didn't work out, I think we're going to insist on a fully correct project in the future. It really isn't that hard. It isn't technically stuff they fail usually. They fail to read and follow the requirements.
I have access to the name when I'm reviewing the code, but I specifically don't look at it until afterwards. I'm sure it wouldn't make a difference, but I figure there's no harm in doing it that way, so why not?
I struggle with the opposite in Europe. (Many) Less progressive companies still ask for CVs with date of birth and photograph.
Even if they're fine with "blind" CVs, the first interview will invariably be just a 15min video call with someone from HR who doesn't know the first thing about the position, and is just there to look at your face and listen to you reiterate your CV.
It's also not often specified explicitly - I notably recently saw the first job offer stating "we consider a complete application to include DOB and photograph".
It has, however, come up every single time when talking to third party recruiters. Maybe they carry additional bias.
Interesting question! It wouldn't be too difficult to fake things, we'd setup a dedicated email alias for each candidate so "$id@jobs.example.com", but it wouldn't be impossible for people to get a friend to do the first part.
I know it crossed my mind that multiple people could be sharing a keyboard during the blind-sessions.
Do companies hiring exclusively via video calls (due to covid) actually make sure that the person is the same in each round? Or is the same person who shows up on day one?
The probability is being caught is much higher, and therefore reduces the probability of people trying to cheat. I also imagine you would be interviewed by people you are working with, so clearly they would notice in day one.
I'm sure zoom filters that detect all such potential prejudice bearing signals and either sanitize them or translate them into your preferred locale (presumably your own - the one to which you're most sensitive) just like Vinge's localizers that were able to sense subtle emotional cues in the clicks and bzzts of an arachnid race and translate them in real time to cartoon caricature projections for human scouts aren't too far away.
Why not go all the way and introduce a virus that carries a genetic mutation to make everyone the same shade of light brown with similar eyes, hair, nose, and lips. Spoiler: we'd just discriminate on some other basis. It's what we do.
I believe some studies have found members of certain groups to be just as, if not more, inclined to make disparate judgments against members of their own group. (I'm thinking of one that involved male and female professors evaluating male and female applicants for something like PhD or postdoc positions.) When disparate outcomes continued to happen, there would be further accusations (possibly "internalized x-ism" or "the 'non-diverse' members of the group must be intimidating the others") and further calls for intervention.
Making it obviously impossible for the judges to pick up the signals on which to discriminate, if it can be done, is much better.
> British TV and radio is always full of Irish people (like herself). Celtic accents are outside England’s class system of resentment, distrust and competitive disadvantage, and so put people at ease.
Realistically, every tenth person you hear on the ITV/BBC/etc should be Scottish or Irish, but in reality they are woefully under-represented
Accent is the bias I am most aware of, and find it most difficult (I think) to consciously compensate for. I notice this when hearing rural Dutch accents, but even worse for me personally is that I notice this when I hear non-native Dutch accents. Just last week I heard someone I have in high esteem from their writing speak in English before, and the disconnect between the image I formed immediately afterwards and the one I already had was disturbing.
The thing is: I've got a typical Dutch accent myself - which, probably because I've heard it most often, is the one that sounds least intelligent to me. The result being that I get unconfident when speaking in English, knowing how much of a disadvantage it is in terms of being perceived as intelligent.
This is definitely a thing in the UK, especially in an office/professional environment. There are far fewer people with a strong regional accent as opposed to an RP [1] accent in senior roles.
You will also never hear a continuity presenter on the BBC Radio 4 with a regional UK accent, although strong Caribbean accents are OK [2]
The BBC has been working pretty hard to change its ways since the Blair years, pushed by the likes of John Prescott actually calling the shots. The difference in presenters' accents now, compared to the '90s, is like night and day - a lot of them actually exaggerate their regional inflections now, particularly on the radio. Which is a good thing overall. Things can improve still but I'm not an advocate for the wanton destruction of RP either, there is value in a certain image the BBC built up over the years (particularly abroad) and losing it completely would be damaging. For example, that "mildly bored" tone that used to be commonplace in RP speakers, and which people directly associate with "poshness", has basically disappeared already in public broadcasting... it's a bit sad.
But yeah, in everything else, the disparity is pretty glaring. I knew I was doing well professionally when I noticed I was attending more and more meetings where the dominant accents were RP and other Mid-Southern England inflections, and I was doing badly when I heard less of that.
I figure the solution is sort of like fighting other forms of unconscious bias like racism with public awareness campaigns and corporate trainings. I imagine this might get more attention in the coming years as social justice leaders find new issues to spotlight.
> with public awareness campaigns and corporate trainings
Please, no. I'm sick of companies assuming I'm a racist and a sexist just because I breathe. We don't need to add another -ist to the already over-generalized list of collective sins.
The proper British accent, incidentally, doesn't exist. This accent, Received Pronunciation, is an artificial creation. It was created fairly recently, too. It is used to designate social status. The only proper British accent is the multitude of variations that comes from different parts of Britain, and such accents originate from different ancient tribes.
Personally speaking, I prefer the colourful multitude of accents, rich in history and personality - in every country for that matter - rather than a dull, standardised, grey and 'proper' single accent to which people wish to conform so as to elevate themselves in others' esteem.
I'm a little wary of some of the assertions in this articles. There are plenty "BBC accents" in British TV and Radio, and the proof of accent ridicule at university is a collections of anecdotes specific to Durham.
My parents grew up before television, and for their early years, they had no electricity at home. and not even any radio to listen to. Their accent was midwestern USA, easy for most people to understand and I got my accent from them.
While young, I would occasionally hear people from the Deep South and have some difficulty with their accents, but by the time I had gotten through college everyone’s accent seemed to have moderated. I believe that thirty years of having widely watched TV programs largely homogenized the pronunciation of US English.
Incidentally, has there been an "accentuation" of accents in the UK in the past 40 years? As a non-native speaker, i used to be able to mostly understand british english, and can easily understand the accents from e.g. the Thatcher-era UK parliament. Nowadays in british media i often hear accents that range from heavy (but still intelligible) to very highly 'oxford' or posh to the point where they are annoying. I think it didn't use to be like that, but i might be wrong.
When I worked at Blizzard Europe as part of the English Customer Service team, we had English speaking agents from lots of different countries, over a dozen at least.
One time a colleague commented that they only really noticed my South African accent when we were out drinking.
This made me realise that almost all the English employees without realising it were “neutralising” their accents to an extent when in the office and conversing with each other (or customers over the phone).
If someone's family comes from a non-English-speaking country, then often that person will temporarily develop a thick accent whenever they get a call from home. The accent then persists for a few minutes. They don't even realize they're doing it.
Indeed I think it's a natural thing everyone does, to some extent, to try to fit in.
However, some people naturally mirror other people more than others. I have a pet theory that the tendency to synchronize gait with whoever you're walking with, the tendency to mirror accents, and other forms of subconscious "fitting in" are all correlated.
All my life people commented or made fun of my Portuguese accent. I'm from [way up in] the north but work in Lisbon and I don't need to utter more than a sentence for people to start asking "where are you from?".
It's a bit annoying and condescending because I know they immediately think I'm some sort of hick like the article mentions - "amiable but fundamentally unserious".
The funny thing is that many English as second language courses/programs, maybe majority of them, teach RP accent as standard English pronunciation, i.e. they teach students to speak like the (mostly) hated minority in the British cultural context.
Stuff like this highlights (one of many reasons) why identity politics is such a bad idea.
Every one of us can be sliced up a hundred ways into things that might be a "privilege" or a disadvantage: accent, height, attractiveness, personality traits.
It makes me sad, but this is true, and it's not just in "north" vs "south", it's largely rural vs urban.
As a city person in the US, if I hear a Texan or Southern accent, I instantly assume the following about that person:
1. They are hard right-wingers who voted for Trump, twice, and probably watch OAN and Newsmax all day.
2. I should not talk about anything remotely sensitive in the presence of this person, and I cannot ever let them find out that I'm bisexual.
3. They will be easier to anger than other people.
I don't know why I assume #3, but I do.
Also, city vs city. If I hear a New Jersey accent, I assume:
1. You have poor character
2. You're very shallow
3. You probably have several STDs.
If I hear a Boston accent, I don't assume anything immediately negative about you yourself, but I do assume that you grew up in a slightly grimy city with slightly rougher people.
It’s not impossible to end. Just have people learn other languages. Once you yourself have struggled with a bad accent and different pronunciation from most people, I think your view tends to change. Monolingualism is the bane of just about every kind of intellectual development and diversity.
I don't agree. I can speak 2 foreign languages (that I learned in adulthood) and read 2 others, but I still have a distinct bias against certain regional accents - though only USA regional accents. I can't distinguish any other countries regional accents (or if I can, they all sound good to me).
-I speak English (my third language) with a marked Aberdinian accent - despite never having lived there; this is courtesy of the kids next door when I was a child - their family had moved from Aberdeen to rural Norway, and if I wanted to play with them, I had better learn how to speak English. (And for a couple of years, said kids were the only teachers around...)
I have tried to lose the accent, but I still get asked by Aberdeen locals how long I've lived there whenever I visit for work.
Good thing the kids next door were from Aberdeen and not the Outer Hebrides, methinks. :)
I can only speak one other (Japanese) and have found the exact opposite. Growing up in the north, I had a strong bias against southern accents, which were almost exclusively treated with disdain by everyone around me. This disappeared after I had to struggle through learning to speak a language quite foreign from my own and where I was helped immensely by people who spoke varying degrees of accented English.
But I think this was also colored by my adult experience of being mocked in academic and professional setting for certain aspects of my speech (most often mispronunciations of foreign, historical or place names that I had only read in books, having had no other exposure to them from my working class family). This kind of mockery always seemed so stupid and low that to hold on to it in anyway myself became repulsive.
> but I still have a distinct bias against certain regional accents
Why? First thing you learn in linguistics 101 is that everyone has an accent and there is no "good" or "bad" dialect. What is so hard about internalizing this for most people?
In the US, if you live on the coasts, most southern accents you’ll hear tend to be comedic relief, uneducated, unsophisticated portrayals in tv/movies. It is unconsciously drilled into the culture that a southern accent is a sign of poor education. It’s hard to fight all that unconscious reinforcement as much as people may intellectually agree that accentism is bad.
I don’t want to get political but it doesn’t help that it’s mostly southern states trying to eliminate evolution curriculums and other anti-science stances...
Being taught something != actually feeling something. You can say "that's bad" and people will repeat after you in agreement. Doesn't mean the voice in the back of their mind actually agrees or can just flip like a switch. Decades of thinking that are slowly ironed in don't just go away in an instant.
It didn't flip a switch for me because I never had any bias against someone for their accent. My question is why has this false, irrational belief about accents persisted for so long in America? There are tons of people in this thread talking about their bias, and I don't understand what led them to that state of mind in the first place.
The article is about this being a global phenomenon, with emphasis on France and the UK. Weird to believe that this is any worse in America than it is anywhere else.
It's human nature to have an in-group and out-group. Sometimes it's as simple as language. Generally, anyone who claims they have absolutely no bias against X people for Y characteristic aren't aware of their own biases.
> Anyone who pretends they have no bias against X people for Y characteristic just isn't aware of their own biases.
Bias is easier to mitigate when you ignore any generalization about any large group of people, such as a linguistic group. Human nature is no excuse for having delusions about an accent.
Even if it was a valid argument that Linguistics 101 cured people of their prejudice... what percentage of people do you think take a Linguistics 101 course?
Kenyans speak 3 languages: English, Kiswahili and the language of the people one is descended from: Maasai etc.
Competency is usually skewed one side or the other: more educated people usually speak good English (often in an accent they like to imagine sounds british or american) Swahili neutrally, and the native language poorly. Less educated people speak bad English, Swahili neutrally (everyone speaks it virtually all the time), and the native language very well.
Does being multilingual limit accentism? Not even a little.
Kenyans who know they can't speak a word of Luhya/Meru/Kipsigis will think less of you if you speak English with a Luhya/Meru or Kipsigis accent and actually will try to teach you how to speak in a less embarrassing way.
Not sure what he means but possibly that there isn't much accentism there. A businessman, prime minister, actor or a real estate agent can have any accent and still be taken as seriously as anyone else. There may be some exceptions where arrogant urban people from the capital (Oslo) will pretend they don't understand someone from say a rural place of Western Norway, but I doubt that really happens a lot.
Voice quality from worst to best:
1. cell phone
2. wired phone
3. Skype
4. in person
My hearing has declined somewhat (too much fooling about with hotrods), making the situation worse.
Another thing I've noticed when listening to a talk show. It's easier to understand the host than the guest, especially when the audio is speeded up. Apparently, a professional host enunciates words better.
I've looked around for a speech coach to improve my enunciation for the presentations I give, but all I could find were autism speech therapists and singing coaches, sigh. (I want to improve my enunciation because the easier it is for people to understand my speech, the more they'll pay attention to my presentation. I know that I sometimes give up listening to a presentation when I have to work too hard to understand the speech.)
I've been doing a lot of video conferencing for work these days (like everyone else) and decided to trash my $5 mike and get a semi pro one so people could hear me clearly.