Accents

I've been thinking a bit about accents this week, and the way they are coded in society with various values. Not a particularly ground-breaking reflection, to be sure, but that's where my brain has been going.

It started really with watching (with a sceptical eye, of course) a video of advice from a PUA source, and realising that I had been surprised to hear a voice that was like my own in that it was English, and not North American (I really don't have the ear to distinguish Canadian from USAian by accent alone, although I can detect some variations of USAian accents). That led to the reflection that in Hollywood, Englishness is often coded as either sinister or posh, and in either case most distinctly as "other". It disturbs me when I hear my accent and somehow code it as "wrong", "off" or "unusual". Television in general doesn't seem to give me that response, because I guess I expect the English sounds more often from that source (although Welsh, Irish and Scottish accents are also common and when coded as "other", usually there are explicit cultural markers to say that we should perceive them as specifically of a particular region and not just as "British" (also noting that strictly speaking, "Welsh" is the only British language left, though the Cornish tongue is being revived and I believe that is also P-Celtic - linguist readers please feel to correct me if I'm wrong!)) Umm, okay, so that was a pretty big aside with nested brackets...

Anyway, so that's where my thinking began.

I arrived at the conclusion that differences in accents are just differences in pronouncing words based on an overlap of familiar sound sets: there's no "right" or "wrong" accent or dialect (an opinion I've held for a while). But some accents seem to become coded as representing a difficulty with the language itself, while others are not. Very often, this seems to have something to do with race.

For example, a thick Glaswegian accent may be more impenetrable to a Home Counties person than a thick Indian subcontinent accent, and yet, somehow, the Glaswegian is presumed to know English well and the difficulty is just in the Home Counties person understanding the Glaswegian, but there is a tendency to code the Indian accent as representing a difficulty with the speaker knowing the language. This happens sometimes even when the speaker may easily in fact be a native speaker of English (that is, it's the primary language that they learned more-or-less from birth). It's not a nice feeling for me to notice that I have these tendencies, too (the Glaswegian/Indian example used above is based on a particularly uncomfortable memory of my reactions to an event about 15 years ago). This seems to me to be one of those ways in which even someone who consciously wants to end racism, still has unconscious socialisation that encodes racist ways of seeing the world into their mind. We live in a racist society, therefore we cannot avoid being on some level racist, however much we may hope to change that society so it is no longer racist. As with so many things, I have my resolve to make my responses and actions in the physical world work against the badness, and to be conscious of what I am thinking and where it comes from. That is, in this type of example, to bring to mind my rational knowledge that accents are equal and with it challenge the assumptions I've formed about a speaker based on how their English sounds. That doesn't take away the assumptions, but it hopefully erodes them and keeps them from affecting the ways I interact with the world and people around me in negative ways.

Vocabulary, knowledge and intelligence, it ought to go without saying, are not correlated with pronunciation (except inasmuch as sometimes the way we code accents shapes the way that people have opportunities to learn and grow in both knowledge and vocabulary). The thing is, the assumptions that create these conditions are often not of a type where a person reacts with surprise to hear a person with a particular accent (probably a person of colour) use a wide and powerful vocabulary, but rather, that the person hearing it then mis-remembers the person's command of language as being lesser, even though it might be equal to or greater than another (probably White) person's usage. Thus, even with counter-examples for the assumptions, the counter-examples become remembered as supporting rather than disproving the assumptions. That's what I know I have to be on my guard against in my own understanding of the world. When I hear someone speak in a specific accent, I need to register not just what they say, but the depth of what they say and the words they use to say it, so I do not make the mistake of mis-remembering.

Language is a powerful tool, and pronunciation is just the colour the tool is painted. The colour makes no difference when the ideas we wish to build with the tool are what matters.