44. Accent Bias

Welcome to the Influency Podcast. What I have for you today is a podcast episode that I've recorded a while back actually and it is an article that I've come across on Medium and I wanted to share that for a while but I kept pushing it back because of many different reasons and I understand now why it was pushed back because I realized that it probably had to happen this week. This week is the Amplify Melanated Voices which is a week where people mute themselves on social media and use their platforms to give voice to black people to support and amplify the uprise against racism and everything that is going on in the US and around the world. So in this article Kimberly Eguiator, who is a Nigerian born queer writer who's based in Toronto, has written about the challenges of a person with an accent and how it comes across and the discrimination they face. And I think this is such an important, important conversation because basically an accent bias is a sheer reflection of the racism, the systematic racism 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 Egiator. 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 anybody that speaks with a different accent is considered unintelligent, less educated, or of lower economic class. The primary reason behind this bias is 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 a 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 accents 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 original 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 or she was exposed to as a child, and even how their favorite teachers 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 customer 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 regarded as uneducated. The bias is something 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 biases. They must be aware that they automatically categorize a person with an accent as uneducated or uninformed and they must strain 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 socioeconomic status. He or she refers to an article by Chakrabarti from 2017 Legally, there is very little guard against discrimination based on a person's accent. There are large volumes of reports about preventing or reducing racism, colorism, 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 or 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 that they are from the southern region and other accents showing that 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 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 Egiator on Medium. 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 a 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.