Does Our English Accent Matter?

As one coming from a foreign country, does my English accent matter in my career and social life? If so, how?

I sat down with Jilly Traganou, architect and professor in architecture and urbanism at Parsons School of Design, and had a conversation about our experience living in New York as immigrants. Jilly was born in Greece, she studied in Japan in 1991-93, 1996-97 and 1999-2000 before and after moving to the US. She has a college-age daughter speaking three languages.

The idea of having this conversation came to me when I happily discovered that Jilly is also a reader of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. If you haven’t read about her or watched her TED talk (which I consider one of the best on TED), Adichie is a celebrated Nigerian novelist whose African female protagonists resonate with a wide range of readers who are dissatisfied with geographic and cultural stereotypes. Two of her famous works are We Should All Be Feminist, an essay originally written for a friend of the author who asked for advice for raising a girl, and Americannah, both Jilly’s and my favourite novel about a Nigerian girl pursuing her American dream, through which she faces the complex situation of identities in the US and decides to stay true to herself.

Because I learned so much from this conversation, and there is so much sharing sentiment, I decided to break it down into three parts. We started by discussing how our accents would affect people’s perception:

Do our accents of English matter?

Q: I was really excited to hear that you also read Adichie’s work.

J: Yes I tried to convince my daughter to read it too. But she couldn't really relate to it. She didn't end up reading it even though she's a very good reader.

Q: How did you try to convince her?

J: Well she likes reading and she first discovered Adichie when she read the book We Should All Be Feminists, which she introduced to me. She loved it, but not so much this one (Americanah). For me, the type of things Adichie describes was also the most memorable of my experience when coming into the U.S. - the language, the tone, the way people relate with each other. The book reminds me that I felt alienated here, especially because of the way people relate with each other, during my first months or even years in the US. But my daughter was born here. So she doesn't have similar experiences.

Q: Do you like the book very much? (yes). Why do you like it?

J: I related to the sensibility. The first arrival. I also feel that the way that the language was used, in general in the US, is very different from how we study English in Greece or in other countries as Adichie describes. She notices the taboos around certain words, she gives the example of the word “fat”, or saying “I am not sure” instead of “I don’t know.” I personally noticed a tendency not to use the word “no” . In other cultures, or at least in Greek culture, it's just easier to negate something. Whereas here, I felt that people are very cautious about being negative. I would say it’s a politeness that wouldn’t be necessary for me, for where I come from where people are expected to have a strong opinion and to often disagree with others.

Q: I might be on the other side of the spectrum. My first language is definitely more polite than English. I feel I have to push myself to be straightforward. To get out of my comfort zone. I learned that Chinese or Mandarin is a very contextualized language. So if you literally translated it into English, it doesn't easily make sense. In Chinese many words are like containers of meanings, if you put them together it makes sense. Otherwise, it doesn't.

J: Japanese may be similar in this way, Yes? because in Japanese you don't have the subject. you assumed the subject by understanding the context. They don't say I or you or she, so without context you don't know who performed a certain action. So it's an indirect language, in the way refusal is implied, and also a language full of silences. It is also a very polite language. There's a book about it, that compares the socially-minded lies in Japanese with American-English ways of speaking. It’s called Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures.

Q: I remember in the novel, Americanah - or memoir, we don’t know (laugh) - at one point the protagonist got to the U.S. and she tried really hard to imitate the perfect American English accent, and at one point she realized this is not working, then she goes back to her Nigerian accent. The writer of this novel also speaks with her Nigerian accent perfectly fine. So I wonder if this is a more general experience that people come here, trying to figure out how much they need to adapt…

J: and they try to find some balance.

Q: Yes.

J: I see people trying to adapt with the manners and words they use. I can understand that adapting could be good for people because they say that if you speak with certain accents people only hear that accent and they don’t look at the content. An accent of a certain area even by native speakers can be turned against them. When people hear their accent, immediately they get where they come from and all the connotations that this brings with it. Regardless of how smart the person is or how good what they are saying is, that’s it. This is also about social class and social capital categories: working class, educated class, etc.

The accent of foreigners may be different, especially in a place like New York. Of course, assumptions about foreigners’ national backgrounds might also lead to bias against them personally. On the other hand, I've also met some people who have strong foreign accents but they have great careers in the US, despite, or--who knows?--because of being foreigners. So I wouldn't say that I would necessarily turn into a negative experience when someone sounds like they're from somewhere else. Sometimes people are more attentively to them, trying to focus and understand what they are saying. Of course many times they just don’t get us, as we both know, and turn off!

- To Be Continue -