On a pragmatic note, the more of an accent a person has, the harder I need to work to understand them. Also, the more accent, the better quality I need from the phone to understand them.
Voice quality from worst to best:
1. cell phone
2. wired phone
3. Skype
4. in person
My hearing has declined somewhat (too much fooling about with hotrods), making the situation worse.
Another thing I've noticed when listening to a talk show. It's easier to understand the host than the guest, especially when the audio is speeded up. Apparently, a professional host enunciates words better.
I've looked around for a speech coach to improve my enunciation for the presentations I give, but all I could find were autism speech therapists and singing coaches, sigh. (I want to improve my enunciation because the easier it is for people to understand my speech, the more they'll pay attention to my presentation. I know that I sometimes give up listening to a presentation when I have to work too hard to understand the speech.)
I've been doing a lot of video conferencing for work these days (like everyone else) and decided to trash my $5 mike and get a semi pro one so people could hear me clearly.
There is no such thing as "more" or "less" accent from a purely linguistic point of view. You can of course distinguish accents by how close they are to some standard accent, but English doesn't even have a single standard accent.
The idea that "some people have accents, but I speak the pure (or a purer version of the) language" plays right into the notion of accentism.
> There is no such thing as "more" or "less" accent from a purely linguistic point of view.
Bit of a nitpick, but I think that's only true of so-called native accents. [0]
If a community speaks the language natively, in a certain distinctive way, that's called a native accent, and as you say it's meaningless to refer to any native accent as more or less accented than another. (edit I suppose in the extreme cases this might not be true, as a community's dialect might evolve into a distinct language, but that's by the by.)
With non-native accents though, the accent is the result of a limited linguistic ability. If you learn French, you'll have less of an English accent as you become more skilled, as the accent is the result of your native English leaking into your French pronunciation.
> There is no such thing as "more" or "less" accent from a purely linguistic point of view.
Pretty sure what the parent meant by "the more of an accent a person has" was "the more a person's accent deviates from my own andthe majority of my community", but wanted to be more concise (if less precise).
Tho German has standardized variants for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, regulated by the international body of of the Council for German Orthography.
Imho it's also kind of reductive to make "accentism" out as something purely discriminatory, when the matter of fact is that particularly a lot of regional accents are often unintelligible for people who are not familiar with them, even when they are native speakers of the language without ascent.
In Germany one can grow up and live in the middle of a state for their whole lives, and still heavily struggle with understanding the local accent of a smaller nearby town.
And while that is certainly an enrichment on the cultural diversity side to have that many, and so different, accents, it also makes communication more difficult, more prone to fail, thus ultimately more likely for misunderstandings to happen.
English is not my first language, so when I speak, people don’t always understand me. Sometimes I have to repeat words more slowly, or replace words with synonyms. This happens because I do not pronounce the words in the way people around me expect to hear.
The explanation above is somewhat long, so I would like to shorten this. I have been saying “I have an accent” instead.
Is “accent” the right word to use in this case? If not, which word is?
You basically said "everyone has an accent", and this is true. Regarding understandable English though, some accents are MUCH harder to understand than others.
To your point about the difficulty of finding a good coach to train enunciation, you should look for a parallel track. A trite example is the scene from Pumping Iron where Schwarzenegger takes ballet classes to help improve his posing. You want someone who can train you in an area that requires the same skills but for a different purpose. I would look to stage acting where the performer is required to speak clearly and forcefully enough that a large audience can understand what they are saying while still maintaining control over their voice. Maybe a Shakespearean acting coach could help you.
Agree on all fronts. As a non-British person living in England, some local accents are nightmarishly different from the basic "international English". For example, I absolutely love Irish and Scottish people, their history, their culture, their traditional attitudes etc etc, but when they "go thick-accent" I can't fucking understand half of what they're saying. I feel like the Robin Williams sketch on landing in Scotland.
> decided to trash my $5 mike and get a semi pro one
Did the same, and also got decent headphones, and it made a ton of difference on both sides - people understand me better and I understand them better. Some people are so impressed they actually ask how I get to "sound so good".
I dread to answer my landline phone now, I keep it working just for emergencies.
I know that acting lessons often have enunciation training. That's partially why there is a "TV accent" that's more or less regarded as the standard US accent.
As a non-native English speaker, I've found that the best way to make myself understandable is to enunciate the consonance clearly. It sounds weird sometimes, and clearly not native, but it's always clear.
Another thing I've trained myself to do is the control of rhythm and stresses. I got this idea from a book on poetry, which classified English as a stress-timed language. Coming from a mother tone of Chinese, I'm not used to grouping rhythm centered on stress syllables. For me, stresses used to live just within an English word, as notated by the dictionary.
When I started to pay attention to a sentence-level flow of stresses, I finally understand how English speaking people gloss over some syllables and emphasize on others. I've even noticed that many eloquent speakers naturally slip into a iambic pentameter when they talk.
Regarding speech understanding: I think even in everyday situations, we rarely understand other people 100% and derive the missing bits via context. I watched a lot of movies in the English original with English subtitles over the past years, and because of that, I am now used to be able to understand movie conversations 100%. Whenever I watch a movie in my native language (without subtitles), I sometimes have to pause and replay a scene to fully understand the dialogue. Sometimes it is virtually impossible, as the actor just mumbles a few syllables. When I ask other people watching with me what the actor just said exactly, they usually also don't have a clue, but it doesn't seem to bother them. Usually, the answer is something like "he certainly meant A, because B just did C, and now he is excepting D".
I’ve been watching a lot of tech YouTube during the lockdown to play with new languages and the accent (and audio quality) tax on me as a listener is real. If I’m trying to learn something from you and it’s mentally hard to start with, if I have to burn extra cycles replaying what I heard to extract the words, I’m going to get a lot less out for the time and effort I put in.
It’s in some ways akin to trying to read content with constant pop-up ads obscuring the message and needing my attention to dismiss.
You might look into drama coaches that give elocution lessons. I imagine that the skills are fairly similar.
I used to do a bit of drama and choir and I found the warmup exercises to be helpful for enunciation and such. A brief warmup before a meeting might be a good idea too. The major downside is that it looks and sounds ridiculous, but it will limber up the muscles in your mouth and face.
Regarding voice clarity on smartphones, it’s quite terrifying to see the difference in audio quality (recorded or during calls) from one instant message app to another, on the same phone.
For example, from worse to best:
- wechat
- WhatsApp
- Threema
- Voice memo.
How are other apps scoring at this? (Telegram / Skype / Naver / etc.)
> the more of an accent a person has, the harder I need to work to understand them.
Implicit in this statement is the (incorrect) assumption that you yourself don't have an accent. It makes no sense to complain about people having "a lot" of accent.
The quoted statement of fact does not imply that the poster believes himself to have no accent. The implication in this statement is the (plainly true) assumption that from the perspective of a listener, the greater difference a speaker has to their own dialect is what is always meant by 'more' of an accent.
Furthermore, the presence of several dialects does not preclude there being a 'central' dialect, with 'less' of an accent, being most easily understood by all- eg the columbus oh 'midland' accent being the traditional american 'radio standard' for its neutrality and strong general pronunciation.
I can't imagine that the voice quality is the same, given things like VoLTE and WiFi calling basically turning cellphones into VOIP systems. I feel like this is one of those things where the improvements were so gradual that you don't recognize them happening. But, if you actually talked to someone on a 30 year old cell phone and network, you would maybe wonder that you ever thought that was clear.
So I think the speaker and microphones probably were better in the older phones, at least as I recall them.
But "HD Voice"[1] as they call it here is really noticeable for me, and with earbuds or similar it's quite good. It's quite apparent when I'm out in the forest and it drops out due to poor signal level.
I'm an engineer, I can't help but solve problems. For example, while the Iraq war was going on and soldiers were getting killed by IEDs, I kept designing a vehicle in my head to be resistant to such infernal devices. The armored vehicle designers likely know how to do this far better than me, but I couldn't help it.
But maybe not. I bought a Generac generator the other day, and the controls on it are so horribly designed I want to scream. It isn't horrible because they saved money, it is pointlessly, stupidly bad, and Generac has been making generators forever. It baffles me.
In New Zealand, we're so young and small that we only have one distinctive regional accent - the Southland accent, typified by a rolling R - as typified in someone fresh in Christchurch telling you that they're from Gorrrre[1].
(As a South Islander, I can often, but not always, tell that a Pakeha (NZ European) person is from the North Island because they have more of a Polynesian influence in their pronunciation - South Island being notoriously white for the most part, the difference is slight but noticeable).
The Gore escapees get lightly teased about it "Hey Sharon tell us how far you went to the bar in your car" etc., but otherwise treated the same as other Kiwis.
"Accentism" as described seems to require a long history of a rural peasantry / working class and an urbanised middle - upper class - in other words, it's just a proxy for class based discrimination.
I guess we're lucky that talking like a farmer isn't considered an impediment to being Prime Minister... so far, although I still put it down to not even being a 200 year old bicultural country.
That said, in the past, speaking in the Received Pronunciation was mandatory for newsreaders etc., and people correctly pronouncing Maori names and place names etc. is still an ongoing slow improvement.
Most of the world can't tell Kiwi and Aussie accents apart. Australians can, though, and any spotted Kiwis overseas will be subjected to ribbing about fush and chups and teen dollars, some of it courtesy of taxpayer dollars: https://youtu.be/3cPs2SzShNc
Also, I've heard that the Southland rolled R comes from Scottish, since there was a significant Scot presence there as exemplified by Dunedin (the Scottish name for Edinburgh).
New Zealand might not have regional accents but it does have sociolects with accompanying stereotypes which in the context of this article amounts to the same thing.
Exactly. Shazza the bogan has a completely different accent from bro Rangi, who sounds completely different to classy old Muriel; while farmer Jim has yet another clearly different accent. I think the differences between these accents are broadening over time i.e. I think social clique accents have got stronger.
I was going to ask if New Zealand was big enough to develop its own regional accents, but I just realized that it's significantly bigger and less densely populated that England. And since England managed to develop a lot of distinct regional accents, I assume that given a century or two there might be a lot of New Zealand accents.
Ireland has literally hundreds of accents with a population of less than 7 million. And that's not an exaggeration. Many Irish people can identify the specific town another Irish person is from based on their accent. I went to school in the largest town that hasn't achieved city status, Drogheda, and I could identify individual estates.
I think calling it a "rolling R" is misleading, since it's actually an approximant, /ɹ/.
The term "rolling" or "rolled" usually refers to trills, /r/ or /ʀ/, which no New Zealand dialect has as far as I can tell. Although feel free to correct me, this is just what I could gather from googling it.
In Germany, this also has a long tradition. People were making fun of Richard Wagner's Saxon dialect for all of his life. When Schiller held lectures, students would later complain that they did not understand anything because he always spoke Swabian. When I was in school, parents that weren't originally from the area complained that their children couldn't follow the physics class because our teacher had a thick Swabian accent.
Where I come from (southwestern part of the country), you can book courses to lose your local Swabian accent to increase your chances on the national job market [0].
> you can book courses to lose your your local Swabian accent to increase your chances on the national job market
Are there courses for newcomers to learn Swabian so they can fit in better with local society and improve their chances on the regional job market? (I'd guess that there aren't, because the market for Standard German education is much bigger.)
There are certainly books for Germans who emigrate to Switzerland about learning Swiss German (which is somewhat close to Swabian), because Swiss people reverse-discriminate: if you speak either Standard German, or any non-Swiss German accent / dialect, you will be treated with distrust (some people will be more tolerant of Austrians or South Germans, though). At the same time, if you try to speak Swiss German but don't so perfectly, people will also think you're being ridiculous. /shrugs (source: grew up in Switzerland)
If you are trying to find a manufactoring job or want to work as a craftsman, than speaking the dialect is definitely an advantage. In higher level jobs, not so much. But to really teach the dialect we would have to agree on a "standard" version, which would be very hard, as the dialect is highly regional and there is strong accentism within the dialect. The safest bet would be to live in Stuttgart for a few years, here you get a light mix of all the variants and Standard German.
But as in any language, perfectly learning a dialect as nearly impossible even for a native speaker. I can understand and imitate Swiss German, but only because it's the same dialect family (Alemannic German).
The way I understand it, linguistic standardization is a modern and artificial process. Even such seemingly scientific and well determined concepts such as language or dialect are in fact arbitrary distinctions imposed on a continuous phenomenon.
In this light, you could say that there's essentially no such thing as the 'right' accent. Whatever is considered standard is simply a reflection of the power structures that currently dominate a society, e.g. if the South had won the Civil War, it's entirely possible that today people would have been making fun of Yankees and their 'hick' accents.
These observations are in line with the spirit of the article. I however disagree with its sort-of conclusion:
> [...] the future belongs to the privately-educated head of HR lecturing you about the latest initiative in Diversity and Inclusion.
"Accentism" can be overcome by first overcoming class and power differences - not easy, but not impossible either.
Heh -- a fun little thing about moving to England is that loads of people use the work "reckon" here in everyday conversation; whereas in the US that would stereotypically be part of a "hick" accent.
> The way I understand it, linguistic standardization is a modern and artificial process.
It may be partially artificial, but I don't see how it could be considered "modern". I'm no linguistics or history expert, but it seems to me there has always been two things in tension: forces which push for unification, and forces which push for diversification.
For unification: On the one hand, there's obviously an advantage to having a common language everyone speaks. 2000 years ago in the Mediterranean it was Greek; 1000 years ago in Europe it was Latin, 800 years ago in the ME / North Africa it was Arabic, etc.
Also, there are advantages to having larger groups of people working together; one way of getting people to work together is to have a shared identity; one way to have a shared identity is to have a shared language. And so one way to grow your power is to unify larger areas (either via annexation or conquest) and then get the areas to have a similar language (either by education / persuasion or suppression). And the most natural way for the powers that be to "unify" a language is to declare the one spoken in the capital city as the official standard.
For the diversification side: It's very natural for language to evolve; and the larger number of people speak a language, the more difficult it is for everything to evolve in the same direction. This means that local areas or local groups are naturally going to "drift".
And once they do drift, then identity comes into play in the opposite ways. It's beneficial for leaders of a large area if everyone has the same identity; but there's an opposite attraction for individuals to identify as part of a smaller, distinct group; and thus to emphasize or even push for the diversification of the local dialect.
> In this light, you could say that there's essentially no such thing as the 'right' accent.
One thing I have noticed is that "prestige dialects", as they're sometimes called, have had people go through the language and "revise" it to make it more "rational". After studying Mandarin for several years, I started studying Cantonese; and it's pretty clear that Mandarin has had a lot more effort from people put into it to revise it and make it consistent, whereas Cantonese is much more spoken, and thus a lot more "quirky" in lots of ways.
The "no double negative" rule in English is an example of this sort of thing. Many languages have "agreement", where the whole sentence is either negative or positive; "Je n'ai jamais" in French could literally be translated "I not have never"; but in French it's not a double negative, it's just "agreement". English used to be exactly the same way (you can read educated people speaking unabashedly with double negatives in, say, the court of Henry VIII); but at some point some clever people decided that it would be much more rational if two negatives made a positive. That became the "prestige dialect", and the "common" people who spoke English the way their ancestors had for hundreds of years were then looked down on for being uneducated and speaking English "incorrectly".
So yes, you can't say Mandarin or the Chicago Manual of Style's version of English is "right"; but it's quite probable that they are more consistent than the alternatives (though perhaps less florid or interesting as a result).
> "Je n'ai jamais" in French could literally be translated "I not have never"; but in French it's not a double negative, it's just "agreement".
In that particular spot, I'd say a more correct literal translation is "I not have ever." Jamais in the absence of ne tends to be more equivalent to "ever", and I would guess that the etymology of "never" is that it's a contraction of "not ever".
You could also argue that the French grammar isn't a double negative. Ne functions like a linguistic particle that introduces a negative phrase, and then the kind of negation is indicated by the subsequent pas, rien, jamais, etc.
Why I'm bothering to dig into this is, that same "prestige dialect" sort of debate functions differently in French. The ne is disappearing from informal spoken French. The French Academy isn't too happy about this; their official position on the subject (which I'll paraphrase - I'm feeling too lazy to hunt it down and translate it) is that words like pas, rien, and jamais have no negative character of their own, so omitting the ne renders the sentence nonsensical.
(To which I suspect any practicing linguist would respond, "Huh? If it's nonsensical, then how come people who speak this way can understand each other perfectly?" But that kind of distressingly pragmatic attitude is exactly why practicing linguists don't get elected to the Academy. I imagine they'd sooner admit une écrivaine.)
> it seems to me there has always been two things in tension: forces which push for unification, and forces which push for diversification.
Agreed. I'm also not a linguist, but it does seem to me that the forces pushing for unification are more societal or statal, while those pushing for diversification are just kind of the natural state of things. Before large scale (somewhat) centralized societies emerged (so before the agricultural revolution) there are still many tens of thousands of years when language was completely non-standardized, strictly spoken and extremely diverse.
I think that may be verifiably false. If I speak French with a heavy English accent (as in pronounce the words as I would in English, not with what is commonly thought of as an "accent from England") any native French speaker will have a hard time understanding me and likewise non-native French speakers who have learned to understand words as they are pronounced in French. What you are proposing would amount to the creation of a new creole but that in itself is a systematized blending of more than one language by a large group of people. You really can't get away from standards when it comes to communication. So much depends on the ability to reliably reproduce sounds that can be easily interpreted by others to mean the same things that you intended when speaking.
> You really can't get away from standards when it comes to communication.
I disagree, at least in principle. It's important to separate the natural phenomenon of language, which has been going on for perhaps 100000 years or so, from the general understanding of the term.
In the general sense language indeed has to be standardized, because that's what is needed to have a functional nation-state that has (ideally) high internal homogeneity. Nation states are however a modern and artificial construct. If you go back a few thousand years (or even a few hundred in some places) you will see much more of a continuous distribution of languages [1]. Even today you can see traces of this in, for example, the Western Romance languages [2].
Again, in the natural sense of the word, there isn't even a clear separation between languages. It's all a continuum of different ways of speaking that flow into each-other.
Anecdata: as a Texan from a rural town currently working in software in Seattle, I've had multiple experiences with this. People assume my political views or agenda far before they know me. Luckily I don't believe it has impacted my actual job search thus far.
To everyone here feeling bad about their southern accents, I'm just gonna say this: as an immigrant, I LOVE those accents. I wish I could just adopt one, but that would sound fake as hell, unfortunately. So I'm putting my accent reduction efforts into sounding more like someone from the West Coast, which I understand to be fairly neutral.
The southern accent thing is very relatable to me, as in my own country (Brazil) I have a very distinct southern accent too (I grew up in a rural area like many folks here).
I've had to confront my southern accent a few times in my life to get taken seriously. Moving from rural North Carolina to attend college in Chapel Hill, I had to "scrub the rural from my voice." When I went to graduate school in New York, I tried my best to coach myself to a "flat American accent," which carried me well through the midwest when I later moved to Ohio.
One of the small joys of my life right now is working with folks with thick accents in positions of seniority. At my previous job, we had a chief scientist who also came from NC. At one point, he told me that he'd suppressed his accent until he was promoted past the level where anyone could judge how he said things instead of what he said.
Likewise. So many American accents are just awful nasally things. I actually can't stand listening to half the courses on Coursera for example. The southern accent is so much easier on the ear.
> ...putting my accent reduction efforts into sounding more like someone from the West Coast, which I understand to be fairly neutral.
Ever since I was a child, others have observed that I speak in a remarkably Broadcast English accent (it was usually described as "you have no accent at all", or "you sound just like the news reporters"). That "neutral American accent" you are after is called General American English, and is still an evolving area [1]. The West Coast lends some of its artifacts to this neutral accent, but General American English is an ambiguous kind of a prestige accent that stands relatively apart from its constituent regional accents.
In daily work however, I determined in my use cases that careful enunciation and appropriate vocabulary for my audience (especially for public speaking) count for far more to obtain engagement and active involvement than my accent. The enunciation part required careful, conscious effort in everyday settings before it could take root as a habit in my consulting work, and led to noticeable sales engagement improvement; I wasn't well-off enough at the time to afford a speech coach.
Ironically, I'm horrible at understanding thick accents myself, currently training myself to get better at that skill by listening to YouTube videos and engaging my coworkers with thick accents over audio chats instead of text chats. It takes a tremendous amount of my attention to parse thick accents, while others seem to take them in stride.
Adding my anecdote to this, I had an interesting experience when my kid did some voice over work for a couple of studios in Bangkok. I grew up in southern California and apparently have that West Coast or news broadcaster accent, which my kid has picked up. And that's what the studios wanted. One was for a Singapore TV kid's show where one of the main actors spoke English with what I guess you would call a Singapore accent. The producer wanted to replace that. Another was a cartoon for Indonesian TV. In both cases they wanted the "neutral American accent".
Haha, last year I was seeing a lady who was from California, migrated out here to Texas, and I ran into the same thing.
I'm actually from Mississippi, so I have an even thicker accent than all but the most rural Texans, and while we were dating, she interjected during one of our talks about politics and life, with, "I could listen to you talk for hours...".
I was genuinely flattered. When I asked why, it as much the same reasoning you gave. I apparently have peculiar word choices that, when combined with an advanced education and a wide and diverse range of interests, causes a lot of cognitive bias in those who hear me speak.
A funny story I tell from time to time, is that I was with a company as the CTO that was acquired by a huge conglomerate with headquarters in Spain, so we had a lot of Spaniards that would come over to work for 6 month to several years. Anyways, one of them, Valentine was the CTO and my Spanyard counterpart. Soon this game began among several of the Spaniard executives to see who could learn obscure US colloquialisms and use them in conversation. That being said, the south has a master on them in spades. So me and one of my senior developers set about to teaching Valantine southern colloquialisms. Which would sometimes come out of his mouth hilariously wrong. Anyways, Valentine and myself end up late to a meeting one day and some decision were made that neither of us agreed with and Valentine says listen you carpetbagging hornswogglers, that dog is not going to hunt (translation, you untrustworthy, scheming people, that idea is stupid and it's not going to work). You could see the absolute defeat on the other Spaniard execs faces. It was a hilarious interaction, in which the other execs where trying to get me to cough up some colloquialisms they could use.
I never suppressed my accent in my career and have done well for myself. That being said, there have been occasions where I could tell I was in a room full of people who assumed I was a dumb southerner. That was to their detriment not mine.
As a side note, I did teach myself how to speak in a completely mid-atlantic accent which is pretty cool because it's not a real accent so nobody knows where you are from. If you want to teach yourself an accent, I would suggest learning mid-atlantic, as you will never run across a native speaker, it will throw people off and strike up a lot of conversation.
It's funny but accents, at least in native language are actually fairly fungible. If someone takes the effort, they can easily fake an accent to fairly realistic abilities so long as they are familiar with the dialect. I can fake a Italian/Brooklyn accent to fairly decent accuracy as most native English speaking Americans are able to. It might not fool a Brooklyn native, but it is good enough to fool the average American. We can thank Rocky Balboa for that. I can fake most southern accents to the extent that I can fool native speakers, but unless you are intricately familiar with the region it is hard to fool natives because there are usually hyper-dialects, I can tell where a person is from if they are from the south based on the southern accent. Yet, most people out of the south cannot tell the difference. For example, a Texas draw from the Old Florida draw, I can tell because I am from Florida, I have it and I get asked if I am from Texas all the time, yet I know when someone is from Texas as it is different in it's inflections. As well Georgia and Alabama are distinct from North Carolina and Tennessee wheras Mississippi is a mix, get too far north and they sound like Tennessee, east and it sounds like Alabama, south west and it sounds like Cajun, but it blends and that is how you can tell they are from Mississippi because they will use colloquialisms from other local accents.
The article appears to be mostly discussing regional accents, but I've noticed the same thing with international accents as well. In America, European accents are seen very positively - even for ESL speakers such as the French or Germans. In contrast, Asian accents are perceived far more negatively. I've literally met Asian colleagues who have enrolled in "accent elimination" classes, for this reason. It's unfortunate that anyone should feel belittled because of their accent.
It’s really hard to overcome. I seem to have an ingrained negative association with Indian accents, despite some of my favorite colleagues being Indian. I have to actively combat this in myself, but it is ever-present. The opposite is true of most European accents.
I grew up in the US south. Many of the brightest, kindest, most well-rounded people I’ve ever met had thick to medium southern accents. And yet, when I hear a thick southern accent, the person drops significantly in my initial estimation of them.
Some folks have used their accent to their advantage. One of the best lawyers I know comes across as a bumpkin due to his accent. So, he uses the element of surprise (dropping really clever rhetorical lines) extremely well.
At a previous job, one of the best developers had a thick accent. When I interviewed him, he wore a cammo hat. I would have rejected him if not for one of my favorite colleagues insisting that he was one of the best devs he’d worked with. That experience has made me put a checklist in place for my interview assessment process.
I wish none of the above was true of me, but there it is. I just have to learn to work around it.
I have a fairly heavy southern accent and have dealt with the issue from time to time, but you don't really see the discrimination against it as much as long as you are in the south. Outside of the south it is a different ball game.
I have a friend who is also an investor that has done really well for himself. His name is Jeff and we were in a venture together and I always wondered how this guy ever became a billionaire, think Barny Fiffe as an investor. Anyways, our venture ends up getting sued by a large company and we have to go to court and all of the sudden this guy becomes Matlock I mean he is absolutely shredding the other legal team, all the while maintaining his charade of please explain that to a dumb southern boy who does not understand all of this.
Anyways, the case is over and I say to him, I think after all these years I just met the real Jeff and he says you have always know the real Jeff as I don't try to deceive people, people deceive themselves by projecting onto me their stereotypes, I just never tried to adapt myself to their model of who I should be, therefore they underestimate me to their own disadvantage. That was the day I learned that being underestimated is actually an advantage and that most people conflate arrogance with confidence. In reflection Jeff was confident he just was not arrogant, arrogance was the weakness he exploited.
As a side note Bill Clinton is another example of using his southerness as a trap for the arrogant to fall into. He was a master at using it to lule his political opponents into underestimating him.
> One of the worst things about Zoom, a friend in finance tells me, is not being able to pick up the status signals and thereby knowing who you can ignore in a meeting.
Man, I'd be tempted to make Zoom compulsory then... Imagine a world where people have to discuss ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments, rather than relying on behind-the-scenes class-solidarity pacts and other unfair arrangements to dismiss the hoi polloi...
I would assume that the organisation or business works as before where decisions and work happens according to some kind of existing hierarchy and that doesn't change because they have adopted video conferencing.
Thus, meetings in Zoom are not discussing ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments, but just a continuation of the existing ways of working. We can then say that, as far as getting work done, a meeting in Zoom is just like a meeting in real life, and as with meetings face to face there are times when things are said which will be ignored. (Ideally we would want our business to work where all information is being assessed logically, but in reality, people are not that logical!).
Video conferencing makes picking up on who is ignoring what harder, it doesn't make the what less easy to ignore. People will still be able to say things, it's just harder for others to notice the reaction of other people are to each other. People are free to react to other people and information, it's just harder to work out how others are reacting to that.
I wouldn't say it's the worse thing about Zoom at all and there are many positives but I can understand that there are some negatives to video conferencing. Humans often communicate many things non verbally. One obvious example would be seeing who is looking at who in real life, where all we now is everyone looking at each other equally.
edits:
It's worth pointing out that the article is about accents being subtle status signals but the anecdote is about social/power status in meetings where accents would be a bad signal.
We all notice and respond to status signals, whether consciously or unconsciously.
To think that it's even possible to have a system where, "people have to discuss ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments" is pretty naive in my opinion.
Social connections and influence will always play a role in things. I'm certain that person will come up with a new heuristic for detecting status over Zoom if it becomes a permanent aspect of their job.
The mention of finance is a giveaway that the author thinks the same as you. UK finance people are stereotyped as being terrible persons, often not without reason...
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Voice quality from worst to best:
1. cell phone
2. wired phone
3. Skype
4. in person
My hearing has declined somewhat (too much fooling about with hotrods), making the situation worse.
Another thing I've noticed when listening to a talk show. It's easier to understand the host than the guest, especially when the audio is speeded up. Apparently, a professional host enunciates words better.
I've looked around for a speech coach to improve my enunciation for the presentations I give, but all I could find were autism speech therapists and singing coaches, sigh. (I want to improve my enunciation because the easier it is for people to understand my speech, the more they'll pay attention to my presentation. I know that I sometimes give up listening to a presentation when I have to work too hard to understand the speech.)
I've been doing a lot of video conferencing for work these days (like everyone else) and decided to trash my $5 mike and get a semi pro one so people could hear me clearly.
The idea that "some people have accents, but I speak the pure (or a purer version of the) language" plays right into the notion of accentism.
Bit of a nitpick, but I think that's only true of so-called native accents. [0]
If a community speaks the language natively, in a certain distinctive way, that's called a native accent, and as you say it's meaningless to refer to any native accent as more or less accented than another. (edit I suppose in the extreme cases this might not be true, as a community's dialect might evolve into a distinct language, but that's by the by.)
With non-native accents though, the accent is the result of a limited linguistic ability. If you learn French, you'll have less of an English accent as you become more skilled, as the accent is the result of your native English leaking into your French pronunciation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_(sociolinguistics)#Non-...
Pretty sure what the parent meant by "the more of an accent a person has" was "the more a person's accent deviates from my own andthe majority of my community", but wanted to be more concise (if less precise).
Imho it's also kind of reductive to make "accentism" out as something purely discriminatory, when the matter of fact is that particularly a lot of regional accents are often unintelligible for people who are not familiar with them, even when they are native speakers of the language without ascent.
In Germany one can grow up and live in the middle of a state for their whole lives, and still heavily struggle with understanding the local accent of a smaller nearby town.
And while that is certainly an enrichment on the cultural diversity side to have that many, and so different, accents, it also makes communication more difficult, more prone to fail, thus ultimately more likely for misunderstandings to happen.
I assumed it was obvious that I meant "relative to my accent", which is what Europeans have noted as a "California accent".
The explanation above is somewhat long, so I would like to shorten this. I have been saying “I have an accent” instead.
Is “accent” the right word to use in this case? If not, which word is?
> decided to trash my $5 mike and get a semi pro one
Did the same, and also got decent headphones, and it made a ton of difference on both sides - people understand me better and I understand them better. Some people are so impressed they actually ask how I get to "sound so good".
I dread to answer my landline phone now, I keep it working just for emergencies.
As a non-native English speaker, I've found that the best way to make myself understandable is to enunciate the consonance clearly. It sounds weird sometimes, and clearly not native, but it's always clear.
Another thing I've trained myself to do is the control of rhythm and stresses. I got this idea from a book on poetry, which classified English as a stress-timed language. Coming from a mother tone of Chinese, I'm not used to grouping rhythm centered on stress syllables. For me, stresses used to live just within an English word, as notated by the dictionary.
When I started to pay attention to a sentence-level flow of stresses, I finally understand how English speaking people gloss over some syllables and emphasize on others. I've even noticed that many eloquent speakers naturally slip into a iambic pentameter when they talk.
It’s in some ways akin to trying to read content with constant pop-up ads obscuring the message and needing my attention to dismiss.
I used to do a bit of drama and choir and I found the warmup exercises to be helpful for enunciation and such. A brief warmup before a meeting might be a good idea too. The major downside is that it looks and sounds ridiculous, but it will limber up the muscles in your mouth and face.
For example, from worse to best:
- wechat - WhatsApp - Threema - Voice memo.
How are other apps scoring at this? (Telegram / Skype / Naver / etc.)
Implicit in this statement is the (incorrect) assumption that you yourself don't have an accent. It makes no sense to complain about people having "a lot" of accent.
Furthermore, the presence of several dialects does not preclude there being a 'central' dialect, with 'less' of an accent, being most easily understood by all- eg the columbus oh 'midland' accent being the traditional american 'radio standard' for its neutrality and strong general pronunciation.
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But "HD Voice"[1] as they call it here is really noticeable for me, and with earbuds or similar it's quite good. It's quite apparent when I'm out in the forest and it drops out due to poor signal level.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_audio
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It's really fascinating that the HN crowd always obsessively needs to put a technical spin on any single topic posted, whatsoever.
But maybe not. I bought a Generac generator the other day, and the controls on it are so horribly designed I want to scream. It isn't horrible because they saved money, it is pointlessly, stupidly bad, and Generac has been making generators forever. It baffles me.
(As a South Islander, I can often, but not always, tell that a Pakeha (NZ European) person is from the North Island because they have more of a Polynesian influence in their pronunciation - South Island being notoriously white for the most part, the difference is slight but noticeable).
The Gore escapees get lightly teased about it "Hey Sharon tell us how far you went to the bar in your car" etc., but otherwise treated the same as other Kiwis.
"Accentism" as described seems to require a long history of a rural peasantry / working class and an urbanised middle - upper class - in other words, it's just a proxy for class based discrimination.
I guess we're lucky that talking like a farmer isn't considered an impediment to being Prime Minister... so far, although I still put it down to not even being a 200 year old bicultural country.
That said, in the past, speaking in the Received Pronunciation was mandatory for newsreaders etc., and people correctly pronouncing Maori names and place names etc. is still an ongoing slow improvement.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore,_New_Zealand
Also, I've heard that the Southland rolled R comes from Scottish, since there was a significant Scot presence there as exemplified by Dunedin (the Scottish name for Edinburgh).
Can also spot some French regional accents, I think I have one when speaking French.
There are few regional differences (mostly city versus rural). https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/lingvan/1/1/article-...
The term "rolling" or "rolled" usually refers to trills, /r/ or /ʀ/, which no New Zealand dialect has as far as I can tell. Although feel free to correct me, this is just what I could gather from googling it.
Dead Comment
Where I come from (southwestern part of the country), you can book courses to lose your local Swabian accent to increase your chances on the national job market [0].
[0] https://www.swp.de/panorama/hochdeutschkurse-zum-dialekt-abg...
Are there courses for newcomers to learn Swabian so they can fit in better with local society and improve their chances on the regional job market? (I'd guess that there aren't, because the market for Standard German education is much bigger.)
But as in any language, perfectly learning a dialect as nearly impossible even for a native speaker. I can understand and imitate Swiss German, but only because it's the same dialect family (Alemannic German).
In this light, you could say that there's essentially no such thing as the 'right' accent. Whatever is considered standard is simply a reflection of the power structures that currently dominate a society, e.g. if the South had won the Civil War, it's entirely possible that today people would have been making fun of Yankees and their 'hick' accents.
These observations are in line with the spirit of the article. I however disagree with its sort-of conclusion:
> [...] the future belongs to the privately-educated head of HR lecturing you about the latest initiative in Diversity and Inclusion.
"Accentism" can be overcome by first overcoming class and power differences - not easy, but not impossible either.
Heh -- a fun little thing about moving to England is that loads of people use the work "reckon" here in everyday conversation; whereas in the US that would stereotypically be part of a "hick" accent.
> The way I understand it, linguistic standardization is a modern and artificial process.
It may be partially artificial, but I don't see how it could be considered "modern". I'm no linguistics or history expert, but it seems to me there has always been two things in tension: forces which push for unification, and forces which push for diversification.
For unification: On the one hand, there's obviously an advantage to having a common language everyone speaks. 2000 years ago in the Mediterranean it was Greek; 1000 years ago in Europe it was Latin, 800 years ago in the ME / North Africa it was Arabic, etc.
Also, there are advantages to having larger groups of people working together; one way of getting people to work together is to have a shared identity; one way to have a shared identity is to have a shared language. And so one way to grow your power is to unify larger areas (either via annexation or conquest) and then get the areas to have a similar language (either by education / persuasion or suppression). And the most natural way for the powers that be to "unify" a language is to declare the one spoken in the capital city as the official standard.
For the diversification side: It's very natural for language to evolve; and the larger number of people speak a language, the more difficult it is for everything to evolve in the same direction. This means that local areas or local groups are naturally going to "drift".
And once they do drift, then identity comes into play in the opposite ways. It's beneficial for leaders of a large area if everyone has the same identity; but there's an opposite attraction for individuals to identify as part of a smaller, distinct group; and thus to emphasize or even push for the diversification of the local dialect.
> In this light, you could say that there's essentially no such thing as the 'right' accent.
One thing I have noticed is that "prestige dialects", as they're sometimes called, have had people go through the language and "revise" it to make it more "rational". After studying Mandarin for several years, I started studying Cantonese; and it's pretty clear that Mandarin has had a lot more effort from people put into it to revise it and make it consistent, whereas Cantonese is much more spoken, and thus a lot more "quirky" in lots of ways.
The "no double negative" rule in English is an example of this sort of thing. Many languages have "agreement", where the whole sentence is either negative or positive; "Je n'ai jamais" in French could literally be translated "I not have never"; but in French it's not a double negative, it's just "agreement". English used to be exactly the same way (you can read educated people speaking unabashedly with double negatives in, say, the court of Henry VIII); but at some point some clever people decided that it would be much more rational if two negatives made a positive. That became the "prestige dialect", and the "common" people who spoke English the way their ancestors had for hundreds of years were then looked down on for being uneducated and speaking English "incorrectly".
So yes, you can't say Mandarin or the Chicago Manual of Style's version of English is "right"; but it's quite probable that they are more consistent than the alternatives (though perhaps less florid or interesting as a result).
In that particular spot, I'd say a more correct literal translation is "I not have ever." Jamais in the absence of ne tends to be more equivalent to "ever", and I would guess that the etymology of "never" is that it's a contraction of "not ever".
You could also argue that the French grammar isn't a double negative. Ne functions like a linguistic particle that introduces a negative phrase, and then the kind of negation is indicated by the subsequent pas, rien, jamais, etc.
Why I'm bothering to dig into this is, that same "prestige dialect" sort of debate functions differently in French. The ne is disappearing from informal spoken French. The French Academy isn't too happy about this; their official position on the subject (which I'll paraphrase - I'm feeling too lazy to hunt it down and translate it) is that words like pas, rien, and jamais have no negative character of their own, so omitting the ne renders the sentence nonsensical.
(To which I suspect any practicing linguist would respond, "Huh? If it's nonsensical, then how come people who speak this way can understand each other perfectly?" But that kind of distressingly pragmatic attitude is exactly why practicing linguists don't get elected to the Academy. I imagine they'd sooner admit une écrivaine.)
Agreed. I'm also not a linguist, but it does seem to me that the forces pushing for unification are more societal or statal, while those pushing for diversification are just kind of the natural state of things. Before large scale (somewhat) centralized societies emerged (so before the agricultural revolution) there are still many tens of thousands of years when language was completely non-standardized, strictly spoken and extremely diverse.
I disagree, at least in principle. It's important to separate the natural phenomenon of language, which has been going on for perhaps 100000 years or so, from the general understanding of the term.
In the general sense language indeed has to be standardized, because that's what is needed to have a functional nation-state that has (ideally) high internal homogeneity. Nation states are however a modern and artificial construct. If you go back a few thousand years (or even a few hundred in some places) you will see much more of a continuous distribution of languages [1]. Even today you can see traces of this in, for example, the Western Romance languages [2].
Again, in the natural sense of the word, there isn't even a clear separation between languages. It's all a continuum of different ways of speaking that flow into each-other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages#/media/File:...
The southern accent thing is very relatable to me, as in my own country (Brazil) I have a very distinct southern accent too (I grew up in a rural area like many folks here).
One of the small joys of my life right now is working with folks with thick accents in positions of seniority. At my previous job, we had a chief scientist who also came from NC. At one point, he told me that he'd suppressed his accent until he was promoted past the level where anyone could judge how he said things instead of what he said.
Ever since I was a child, others have observed that I speak in a remarkably Broadcast English accent (it was usually described as "you have no accent at all", or "you sound just like the news reporters"). That "neutral American accent" you are after is called General American English, and is still an evolving area [1]. The West Coast lends some of its artifacts to this neutral accent, but General American English is an ambiguous kind of a prestige accent that stands relatively apart from its constituent regional accents.
In daily work however, I determined in my use cases that careful enunciation and appropriate vocabulary for my audience (especially for public speaking) count for far more to obtain engagement and active involvement than my accent. The enunciation part required careful, conscious effort in everyday settings before it could take root as a habit in my consulting work, and led to noticeable sales engagement improvement; I wasn't well-off enough at the time to afford a speech coach.
Ironically, I'm horrible at understanding thick accents myself, currently training myself to get better at that skill by listening to YouTube videos and engaging my coworkers with thick accents over audio chats instead of text chats. It takes a tremendous amount of my attention to parse thick accents, while others seem to take them in stride.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
I'm actually from Mississippi, so I have an even thicker accent than all but the most rural Texans, and while we were dating, she interjected during one of our talks about politics and life, with, "I could listen to you talk for hours...".
I was genuinely flattered. When I asked why, it as much the same reasoning you gave. I apparently have peculiar word choices that, when combined with an advanced education and a wide and diverse range of interests, causes a lot of cognitive bias in those who hear me speak.
I never suppressed my accent in my career and have done well for myself. That being said, there have been occasions where I could tell I was in a room full of people who assumed I was a dumb southerner. That was to their detriment not mine.
As a side note, I did teach myself how to speak in a completely mid-atlantic accent which is pretty cool because it's not a real accent so nobody knows where you are from. If you want to teach yourself an accent, I would suggest learning mid-atlantic, as you will never run across a native speaker, it will throw people off and strike up a lot of conversation.
It's funny but accents, at least in native language are actually fairly fungible. If someone takes the effort, they can easily fake an accent to fairly realistic abilities so long as they are familiar with the dialect. I can fake a Italian/Brooklyn accent to fairly decent accuracy as most native English speaking Americans are able to. It might not fool a Brooklyn native, but it is good enough to fool the average American. We can thank Rocky Balboa for that. I can fake most southern accents to the extent that I can fool native speakers, but unless you are intricately familiar with the region it is hard to fool natives because there are usually hyper-dialects, I can tell where a person is from if they are from the south based on the southern accent. Yet, most people out of the south cannot tell the difference. For example, a Texas draw from the Old Florida draw, I can tell because I am from Florida, I have it and I get asked if I am from Texas all the time, yet I know when someone is from Texas as it is different in it's inflections. As well Georgia and Alabama are distinct from North Carolina and Tennessee wheras Mississippi is a mix, get too far north and they sound like Tennessee, east and it sounds like Alabama, south west and it sounds like Cajun, but it blends and that is how you can tell they are from Mississippi because they will use colloquialisms from other local accents.
I grew up in the US south. Many of the brightest, kindest, most well-rounded people I’ve ever met had thick to medium southern accents. And yet, when I hear a thick southern accent, the person drops significantly in my initial estimation of them.
Some folks have used their accent to their advantage. One of the best lawyers I know comes across as a bumpkin due to his accent. So, he uses the element of surprise (dropping really clever rhetorical lines) extremely well.
At a previous job, one of the best developers had a thick accent. When I interviewed him, he wore a cammo hat. I would have rejected him if not for one of my favorite colleagues insisting that he was one of the best devs he’d worked with. That experience has made me put a checklist in place for my interview assessment process.
I wish none of the above was true of me, but there it is. I just have to learn to work around it.
I have a friend who is also an investor that has done really well for himself. His name is Jeff and we were in a venture together and I always wondered how this guy ever became a billionaire, think Barny Fiffe as an investor. Anyways, our venture ends up getting sued by a large company and we have to go to court and all of the sudden this guy becomes Matlock I mean he is absolutely shredding the other legal team, all the while maintaining his charade of please explain that to a dumb southern boy who does not understand all of this.
Anyways, the case is over and I say to him, I think after all these years I just met the real Jeff and he says you have always know the real Jeff as I don't try to deceive people, people deceive themselves by projecting onto me their stereotypes, I just never tried to adapt myself to their model of who I should be, therefore they underestimate me to their own disadvantage. That was the day I learned that being underestimated is actually an advantage and that most people conflate arrogance with confidence. In reflection Jeff was confident he just was not arrogant, arrogance was the weakness he exploited.
As a side note Bill Clinton is another example of using his southerness as a trap for the arrogant to fall into. He was a master at using it to lule his political opponents into underestimating him.
Man, I'd be tempted to make Zoom compulsory then... Imagine a world where people have to discuss ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments, rather than relying on behind-the-scenes class-solidarity pacts and other unfair arrangements to dismiss the hoi polloi...
Thus, meetings in Zoom are not discussing ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments, but just a continuation of the existing ways of working. We can then say that, as far as getting work done, a meeting in Zoom is just like a meeting in real life, and as with meetings face to face there are times when things are said which will be ignored. (Ideally we would want our business to work where all information is being assessed logically, but in reality, people are not that logical!).
Video conferencing makes picking up on who is ignoring what harder, it doesn't make the what less easy to ignore. People will still be able to say things, it's just harder for others to notice the reaction of other people are to each other. People are free to react to other people and information, it's just harder to work out how others are reacting to that.
I wouldn't say it's the worse thing about Zoom at all and there are many positives but I can understand that there are some negatives to video conferencing. Humans often communicate many things non verbally. One obvious example would be seeing who is looking at who in real life, where all we now is everyone looking at each other equally.
edits: It's worth pointing out that the article is about accents being subtle status signals but the anecdote is about social/power status in meetings where accents would be a bad signal.
To think that it's even possible to have a system where, "people have to discuss ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments" is pretty naive in my opinion.
Social connections and influence will always play a role in things. I'm certain that person will come up with a new heuristic for detecting status over Zoom if it becomes a permanent aspect of their job.