Globalization has created a plethora of opportunities, notably trade, research and development, and also for languages. However, as more and more people from across the globe need to speak the lingua franca, English (Seidlhofer, 2013), to be a part of everyday business and personal lives, being monolingual is becoming a niche whilst speaking multiple languages is becoming somewhat normative (Poggensee, 2019). But what does this mean for accent?

An accent is a way of speaking shaped by the combination of your geography, social class, education, ethnicity, and also your linguistic repertoire, which may influence the rules of the sounds you are using in order to speak a target language that is not from your linguistic repertoire. Thus, the listener sounding foreign to native speakers, hence “a foreign accent.” Our features of speaking that create accentual variation are called sociophonetic variables, including how we produce vowels and consonants and differences in stress, rhythm, intonation, and voice quality (Foulkes & Docherty, 2006).

Everyone has an accent, and there is no perfect, neutral, or unaccented language. Accents carry identity (Derwing & Munro, 2009) and also a sign that this speaker is a polyglot, which is ambulant of a sign of bravery. It is courageous to leave the safe territory and go into uncharted waters, such as learning an entirely new language. The reasoning behind learning a new language can be motivated by travel, love, or work. However, for needless reasons, learning a new language means overcoming social anxieties of making mistakes, feeling vulnerable, and yet trying to navigate confidence in a new skill and overcoming stressful situations in which you are not fully grasping the linguistic context yet. Nevertheless, once all this is overcome with hard-work perseverance, strength, and confidence, you have earned a new language allowing you the ability to access new culture, new business, new places, a new identity that this language represents to you, and, of course, opening you up to even more people than you previously couldn’t directly speak with.

Although having an accent represents the above, there is an emphasis on speaking without accents and as close as possible to the standardized version of the target language you are learning (Mahdi, 2019). This process is called “accent reduction.” However, the term accent reduction is outdated and linguistically prejudiced as it implies that the accent should be reduced or even replaced. The ideology of changing one’s accent may also be more deeply rooted in that within the general population. There is a consensus that accents that sound foreign and not following the typical phonology are judged as closely tied to social status. This is infamously seen in Labov’s study (1996) in New York with the rhotic /R/, which was misjudged in New York in a perception study. The results from Labov (1996) have been mimicked across many sociolinguistic studies in perception that confirm judgment, harassment, and even stigmatization of those who have perceived “foreign” accents (Dixon, Mahoney & Cocks, 2002; Cantone et al., 2019). Additionally, our accent is how we express ourselves as individuals; it helps us voice our identity. It also distinguishes one language speaker from another; trying to erase one’s identity means trying to erase someone’s voice (Derwing & Munro, 2009). 

Although with the aid of a dialect coach or speech-language pathologist, you may be able to “smooth” your accent, it is impossible to erase your linguistic makeup and your previous phonological repertoire, which in effect, influences the new language you are learning. This is because many of these feature sociophonetic variables can only be controlled to a limited degree, if at all. Speakers have little control of biologically-determined features, and thus we cannot expect reductions such as erasing one’s accent to take place (Mennen, Schaeffler, & Docherty, 2012). Additionally, in concern to the terminology “foreign accent,” perhaps continuing the use of “foreign,” thus referring to something alien, is also feeding into the judgment of those with accents, to perhaps something more appropriate and without prejudice such as “alternate accent.” 

Whilst we celebrate linguistic variance, it is essential to note that although accents are beautiful, the important part of the language user is that their message comes across with clarity despite an accent. You may have a strong accent, but still, the message can come across. If the accent is impeding their main message from getting across to their interlocutor, as clarity will ensure less miscommunication and the ability to come across correctly in friendships and relationships but also with business partners. Thus, the focus should not be on reducing the accent but on obtaining clarity while maintaining your linguistic identity. In any case, as more and more people begin to learn new languages, we are becoming increasingly good listeners, hearing many more accents and subsequently becoming salient to altered phonological patterns.

Even with a strong accent, you can still contribute in more than one way!

SPEAK BUILD CONTRIBUTE

Used sources:

Cantone, J. A., Martinez, L. N., Willis-Esqueda, C., & Miller, T. (2019). Sounding guilty: How accent bias affects juror judgments of culpability. Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, 17(3), 228-253. doi:10.1080/15377938.2019.1623963

Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (2009). Putting accent in its place: Rethinking obstacles to communication. Language Teaching, 42(4), 476-490. 

Dixon, J. A., Mahoney, B., & Cocks, R. (2002). Accents of Guilt?:Effects of Regional Accent, Race, and Crime Type on Attributions of Guilt. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21(2), 162-168. doi:10.1177/02627×02021002004

Foulkes, P., & Docherty, G. (2006). The social life of phonetics and phonology. Journal of Phonetics, 34(4), 409-438. 

Mahdi, Rahimian (2018). Accent, intelligibility, and identity in international teaching assistants and internationally-educated instructors (PhD thesis). University of Manitoba. hdl:1993/33028

Mennen, I., Schaeffler, F., & Dickie, C. (2014). Second language acquisition of pitch range in German learners of English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36(2), 303-329. doi:10.1017/S0272263114000023

Labov, W., (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Poggensee, Anna, “The effects of globalization on English language learning: Perspectives from Senegal and the United States” (2016). Honors Theses. 2719. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/honors_theses/2719

 Seidlhofer, Barbara (2013). Understanding English as a Lingua Franca – Oxford Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press