How Do You Know if You Have Accent or Not
Stance
Everyone Has an Accent
Mr. Agudo teaches Castilian and Portuguese to college students.
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I take an accent. So do yous.
I am an immigrant who has spent about as much time in the United States as I have in my dwelling house country, Spain. I am also the director of Dartmouth'south linguistic communication programs in Spanish and Portuguese. Both facts explain, but only partly, why I experience a special fondness for the FX drama "The Americans," in which Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, a hubby-and-wife team of hush-hush K.Grand.B. agents living in suburban Washington. I can't exist the only one who nodded approvingly when they were both nominated for Emmys concluding week.
What interests me every bit a linguist is that the Jenningses are, as the pilot tells us, "supersecret spies living next door" who "speak better English than we do." Even their neighbour, an F.B.I. agent on the counterintelligence shell, suspects zip.
Living every bit I do, deeply immersed in the work of teaching and learning second languages, it was fun to watch a TV series in which the main characters' aptitude for them was so central to the plot. Nonetheless, the premise that yous can speak a language without any emphasis at all is a loaded one. You can't actually practice this.
Worse, when nosotros fetishize sure accents and disdain others, it can atomic number 82 to real bigotry in job interviews, performance evaluations and access to housing, to name just a few of the areas where having or not having a sure accent has profound consequences. Too often, at the hospital or the banking concern, in the part or at a restaurant — even in the classroom — we encompass the idea that there is a correct way for our words to sound and that the perfect accent is one that is non just inaudible, simply also invisible.
If you look at the question from a sociolinguistic bespeak of view, having no emphasis is plainly impossible. An accent is simply a manner of speaking shaped past a combination of geography, social class, education, ethnicity and first language. I have one; you have i; everybody has one. At that place is no such thing as perfect, neutral or unaccented English — or Spanish, for that matter, or any other linguistic communication. To say that someone does not take an accent is as conceivable as proverb that someone does not accept any facial features.
We know this, simply still, at a time when the percentage of foreign-born residents in the U.s. is at its highest indicate in a century, the distinction between "native" and "nonnative" has grown fell, and it is worth reminding ourselves of it again and again: No one speaks without an accent.
When nosotros say that someone speaks with an accent, nosotros more often than not mean one of two things: a nonnative accent or a and then-called nonstandard accent. Both can accept consequences for their speakers. In other words, information technology is worth acknowledging that people discriminate on the basis of accent within their own language group, every bit well equally against those perceived equally language outsiders. The privileged status of the standard emphasis is, of course, rooted in instruction and socioeconomic ability.
The standard accent is not necessarily the same as the highest-status accent. It is simply the dominant accent, the one y'all are virtually likely to hear in the media, the one that is considered neutral. Nonstandard native accents are also underrepresented in the media, and similar nonnative accents, are probable to exist stereotyped and mocked. Terms similar Southern drawl, Midwestern twang or Valley Girl upspeak underscore the layered status attached to particular ways of speaking.
Such judgments are purely social — to linguists, the distinctions are arbitrary. Yet, the notion of the neutral, perfect emphasis is so pervasive that speakers with stigmatized accents ofttimes internalize the prejudice they face. The recent re-evaluation of the "Simpsons" character Apu provides an important example of how the media and popular culture employ accents to make piece of cake — and uneasy — jokes.
When you are learning a language, a marked accent is ordinarily too accompanied by other features, similar express vocabulary or grammatical mistakes. In the classroom, we sympathize that this is a normal phase in the development of proficiency. My family unit back in Madrid would have a difficult time agreement the Spanish of my English-speaking students in my first-semester classroom.
Later, these same students report abroad in Barcelona or Cuzco or Buenos Aires, and oftentimes struggle to make themselves understood. But such is the privilege of English — and this is fundamental — that nobody hearing their American accents presumes that they are less capable, less aggressive or less honest than if their R's had a nicer trill. Yet this is exactly the kind of assumption that a Spanish accent — and many, many others — is probable to trigger within the United States.
It's certainly true that a marked accent can go in the way of making yourself understood. E.S.Fifty. learners and others are well brash to work on their pronunciation. As a teacher, I do try to pb my students toward some version of that flawed platonic, the native accent. One of the ironies in this is that I — along with most of my boyfriend teachers from the xx countries (not counting Puerto Rico) where Spanish is an official language — long ago shed the specific regional, class-shaped intonations and vocabulary that are, or in one case were, our native accents. My signal is non that we demand to forget the aim of easily comprehensible communication — obviously, that remains the goal. But nosotros do need to set aside the illusion that there is a single true and authentic way to speak.
English is a global language with many native and nonnative varieties. Worldwide, nonnative speakers of English outnumber natives by a ratio of 3 to ane. Even in the United States, which has the largest population of native English speakers, there are, co-ordinate to ane estimate, well-nigh fifty million speakers of English equally a second language. What does it even mean to audio native when and so many English speakers are second-language speakers? Unless you are an embedded spy similar the Jenningses, it is counterproductive to concur nativelike pronunciation as the bar y'all have to clear.
Accent by itself is a shallow mensurate of language proficiency, the linguistic equivalent of judging people by their looks. Instead, nosotros should get aware of our linguistic biases and acquire to mind more deeply before forming judgments. How large and how varied is the person's vocabulary? Can she participate in most daily interactions? How much item can he provide when retelling something? Can she hold her ain in an argument?
Language discrimination based on accent is not merely an academic thought. Experiments bear witness that people tend to make negative stereotypical assumptions about speakers with a nonnative accent. The effect extends all the fashion to bias against native speakers whose proper name or ethnicity reads every bit foreign. Studies evidence that when nonnative speakers reply to advertisements for housing, their conversations with prospective landlords are more probable to be unsuccessful, on average, than those of callers "without accents."
So I promise you like my accent as much as I like yours.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/opinion/sunday/everyone-has-an-accent.html
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