that is happening in our society.
And I'm happy to share that with you.
And if you go to my website, you can also download the transcript.
So here it is.
'Accent Bias', by Kimberly Ehigiator.
Accent bias can be defined as the unjustifiable discrimination
of individuals who speak a language with an accent.
The perception of accents is usual and people tend to act more favorably
to people that speak like them just like they tend to be more accepting
of people that look like them.
In the US and Canada, where English is the main language spoken, people
tend to discriminate against people that speak English differently.
Generally, the European and the North American accents are viewed as superior,
and any body that speaks with a different accent is considered unintelligent, less
educated or of a lower economic class.
The primary reason behind this bias is a self constructed social identity
and high ethnocentric attitude where English speakers from North America
and Europe see their own accents as superior and judge other English
speakers with different accents.
Individuals correlate accent with social status and by that logic, they give a
person with the perceived “superior” accent more respect; such person is
considered to be of a higher social class and education than a person
with a perceived “inferior” accent.
English speakers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East suffer
the most from accent bias.
Though globalization is expected to improve multicultural sensitivity, it
fails to address the discrimination people face as a result of accent bias.
Linguistic variations which show up in people’s accent is an effective means of
discrimination because when people reject a person’s accent they simultaneously
reject the person’s identity realized through race, ethnic heritage, national
origin or regional affiliation.
Accents are developed when we learn to speak, they reflect the linguistic
influences an individual had growing up.
A huge part of a person’s accent is influenced by the people around him, the
TV shows he/ she was exposed to as a child and even how their favorite teacher spoke.
Accents do not represent a person’s level of education; a person’s accent
is in no way a representation of their academic qualifications or vice versa.
Academic achievements are mostly achieved in adulthood and accents are formed in
childhood therefore there is little or no correlation between the two factors.
A person’s accent is another unquantifiable tool of discrimination.
Most English non-native speakers are usually brown and black folks
who already face discrimination.
The negative bias they face as a result of their accent is
a byproduct of discrimination faced as a result of racism.
In the US and in Canada, English speakers with non-native accents
suffer the most discrimination.
We have fewer employment opportunities, we have lower access to health
care, we receive inferior customers service, we have less housing
options and lower credibility.
We are judged based on how we sound before even given the
opportunity to prove our worth.
Listeners are not interested in trying to understand us so we are
dismissed and regraded as uneducated.
The bias is sometimes unintentional and people sometimes do not even know they are
adversely biased to non-native speakers.
Listeners must put more effort into listening to a person
that speaks with an accent.
Listeners must be aware of their bias; they must be aware that they automatically
categorize a person with an accent as uneducated or uninformed and they must
train their brain to remove such bias.
A person with an accent will pronounce words differently and the
onus is on the listener to try to understand what the speaker is saying.
The only difference between a person with an accent and a person without
an accent is their pronunciation of words, this should therefore
not be the basis of measuring their education or socio-economic status.
[Chakraborty, 2017]
Legally, there is very little to guard against discrimination
based on a person’s accent.
There are large volumes of reports about preventing/reducing racism,
colourism, sexism but none or very few on accent related discrimination.
Accent bias appears less opposed than racial, religious or gender-based
bias even though it is a widely known form of discrimination.
Employers hardly consider accent bias as a form of discrimination to train employees
about, it is hardly ever the focus.
On most employment contracts, they state that they are an equal opportunity
employer and all applicants or employees will be considered without attention to
race, gender, national origin, disability or any other visible distinctive trait,
they all however fail to mention accent.
For us with non-native accents, to fit in we try to tame our accents so that
we sound more American or Canadian or European even though we are speaking a
language which we have spoken from birth.
It creates an inferiority complex that is hardly ever talked about.
The person with a non-native accent knows he/she might be judged for their
pronunciation of a certain word, they focus more on that word and less on
their speech and end up fumbling on words and sentences thus affirming
the perception that we are uneducated and cannot speak proper English.
It is quite inconvenient and embarrassing for non-native speakers.
Flipping the sides, people with non-native English accents have no problem listening
to Europeans and North Americans.
They put effort into listening because they understand that the
pronunciation of words may be different from what they are used to.
The effort to listen to a person with a different accent should not be one sided.
It is different, if the speaker is being incoherent and it isn’t
possible to understand them, however when they are just pronouncing
words differently the listener should put in an effort to listen.
Everybody has an accent.
In the age of globalization, where migration is more common than ever
and with the internet, people are exposed to different people with
different backgrounds, and most likely, different accents, therefore it makes
no sense to discriminate against a person because they speak different.
With about 195 countries in the world we are not all expected to sound the same.
People in the same country might even sound different; people have
accents showing they are from the southern region and other accents
showing they are from the north.
When the accent is, however, African sounding we are dismissed
as uneducated, causing unnecessary inferior complex among the speakers.
People are denied employments because employers think that just because
they sound different, they might not understand the work at hand.
People must stop assigning superiority to North American and European accents.
We must understand that there is no superior accent.
The reason those are even considered superior is because that is the
accents of colonizers; they were slave raiders and told their captives that
the only way to sound was like them.
They brainwashed their captives into thinking there was something wrong
with the way they sounded, even when the colonizers taught Africans
how to speak English, they detested the accents that their precious
English language was spoken in.
The colonizers brainwashed the world into thinking that their accent was superior.
It is not.
In 2020, we must learn to accommodate and accept difference; we must learn
to accept that there are different people in the world that sound
different, look different, of different sexual orientations, and all that
difference is beautiful and should not be a tool for discrimination.
This, again, was written by Kimberly Ehigiator on Medium.com.
Kimberly is a Nigerian born queer writer based in Toronto who writes
about everything that interests her, like travel, books, social
issues, business, and humans.
I'm going to post the link to this article in the description below.
In the meantime, I don't think I have anything else to add.
Thank you Kimberly.
Thank you for listening.
Peace.