Transcriber: Thi Nguyen Reviewer: Eunice Tan
Monday morning.
Your typical start to the week
with a coffee and a catch-up with your colleagues.
I rushed straight over to my colleague Phil.
I said, ‘Phil, my uncle bought a cannery.’
[CANNERY]
I was met with a puzzled face and a blank stare.
So I repeated the word again with more passion and excitement.
I said, ‘A yellow cannery?’
I was hoping to provide more information in the form of colour.
Still I had no luck.
I could sense the growing feeling of frustration and awkwardness
between us both.
I started to feel anxious.
So in my last desperate attempt,
I dug deeper to provide more information to this guessing game.
I remembered that the yellow canary was a popular Looney Tunes character
that had a friend, a black cat called Sylvester.
I believe this was a turning point in our conversation with Phil,
and a penny dropped for him.
He asked, ‘Tweety?’
I happily shouted as my face lit up, ‘Yes, Tweety!’
He laughed out loud
and enlightened me with the correct pronunciation
of the yellow bird called a canary.
I accepted the fate and apologised for my accent.
I realised that day that I will always be a canary singing in a cannery.
This story illustrates
the many awkward situations and conversations I have experienced
on my journey to master the English language
with a Northern Irish accent.
I moved to Northern Ireland 16 years ago, and I couldn’t speak a word of English.
The language what I experienced on arrival
was not what I was used to hearing on TV or what I learnt in school.
Everything was different:
the words, the accents, the slang and the speed of speech.
I spent my first 12 months lip-reading and listening
and observing the people who I worked with.
After every shift in the evening,
I went back, and I was reading the children’s books
and just researching the words I couldn’t understand
In the dictionary I brought with me.
I immersed myself into the language of the community that welcomed me in.
At the weekends, I was invited to spend time with the local people,
where I had many opportunities to learn all the jokes and the idioms.
I wanted to master this tongue-twisting accent
of the social group I was invited to.
We learn to imitate the words and the sounds
from the people close to us.
We create our own accents, and we carry those with us.
Our accents and speech change as we move through life:
when we move to a new country,
when we learn a new language or join a new community.
I happened to do all three at the same time.
Language is perhaps the most human manifestation of our intelligence.
There are over seven billion people speaking more than 7,000 languages.
The English-speaking community is the largest in the world.
According to Ethnologue language research,
there are over 1.3 billion English speakers across 146 countries.
This figure represents both native and non-native speakers.
In general, people struggle to imagine the concept of how challenging it is
to lead a professional career in a second language.
The effort of having to keep up with your colleagues
using jargon, metaphors, abbreviations, idioms
takes years to master.
The burden of bridging the communication gap
falls on the shoulders of the non-native speaker,
who must work harder to keep up.
Can you imagine how fluently I must be able to speak in a second language
to be able to communicate ideas worth spreading?
I want to encourage your curiosity to think and hear beyond my accent.
The way we speak shapes the world we live in.
And every time we speak, we reveal a small part of our identity
to the people and to the world to interpret.
We wear our accents on our sleeves.
And often,
we open ourselves to stereotyping, misunderstandings and assumptions.
There are three common misconceptions people have about accents.
The first one is that everyone has an accent apart from you.
Everyone who speaks has an accent.
The second misconception is that everyone hears accents the same way as you do.
One person may find my accent strong; another may disagree.
The third misconception is the listener thinking that they cannot understand.
People tend to underestimate their own abilities.
Often, we are called poor communicators,
whereas we might be talking to a poor listener instead.
By becoming active in listening, clarifying and reflecting,
we can create better experiences for each other.
When we aren't exposed to different accents,
our brain does not have enough information to correctly identify what it is hearing,
so it tries to fill in the missing pieces from its database of past experiences.
By exposing ourselves to new accents and different accents,
we can grow our database and we can shrink our bias.
There are many positive aspects of learning multiple languages.
A linguistically challenged brain
processes information more efficiently and slows down cognitive decline.
You can sharpen your brain at any stage of your life by learning a new language.
By engaging in this process,
you indirectly enhance your social and communication skills.
You become more aware of cultural differences,
language nuances and complex situations.
You are moving from simply hearing to actively listening.
Next time you speak to a person who may sound different to you,
imagine the different colours and patterns of a kaleidoscope
that represent one’s identity, heritage and journey through life.
If I were to ask you to name all the colours you see in a kaleidoscope,
you wouldn’t be able to distinguish them all clearly.
Those are our personality traits.
But you could, however, tell some of the large groups of the colours
that represent our stereotypes that we associate with those accents.
When we hear a person speak, we don’t listen to the words -
we hear sounds.
We instantly start to process what we can hear
and look for shortcuts of information that we can use to categorise the person.
By remembering the colourful pattern of a kaleidoscope,
I want you to imagine a world
where we can hear beyond an accent and see the human behind the voice.
My voice creates my accent, my accent completes my speech,
my speech tells my story, and my story reveals my identity.
For years, I was trying to hide who I was and how I sounded.
I had to rediscover my own identity, my culture and my heritage.
I am proud to be a Slovakian woman but of Hungarian heritage.
I learnt two beautiful languages as a child.
‘Az első szavaimat magyarul mondtam’
means that I spoke my first words in Hungarian.
‘A prvé slová som písala po slovensky’ -
I wrote my first words in Slovakian.
Let’s celebrate the beauty and distinction.
Celebrate that we can offer insights into cultures through our accents
and find common ground through our differences.
Anywhere I travel to,
my ears will always perk up when I hear a familiar language or an accent.
We have a strong connection to both that drives our bias and our appreciation.
You have heard me speak three different languages.
Each one is a window into a new culture that are all part of my identity.
Let’s use our languages to welcome people into our cultures
and our accents as a key to unlock potential
to being more inclusive, being better listeners
and having great conversations.
The art of conversation
is in the delivery of the speaker and the ear of the listener.
So speak with confidence and listen with intent.