The Significance Of Accents

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent – Mark Twain

English is now recognized as the global language, widely spoken in most parts of the world. It is certainly the universal language of international trade and commerce. However, distinctive accents in the use of English in different parts of the world make English sound as if different languages are being spoken.

Countries originally settled by Anglo-Saxons, like the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, have, with some variations, recognized English as their national language. English of the original immigrants, blended with those of the hundreds of millions who emigrated to the New World from Europe, and the more recent arrivals from the colonies of the old British Empire in Asia, Africa and the West Indies.

However, the nations colonized by the British, especially those countries in the Indian Subcontinent, boasted of a proud history of their own languages and cultures. Their willing embrace of the English was necessarily merged with the sounds of their native languages, Hindi, Urdu, Sinhala and Tamil. The language resulting from the blending of these proud languages with that of the invader unfortunately gave birth to an English accent which is an unpleasant onslaught on the senses.

The 20th century saw a flood of immigrants to Europe, Canada and the USA. Religious persecution, poverty and two World Wars were the main reasons for immigration to the USA; the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, economic refugees seeking a better future for themselves and their children. The end of World War II and the resultant labor shortages saw an influx of immigrants to Europe. Post-war Britain facing labor shortages enticed immigrants from their defunct empire to the nation we had been brainwashed to revere as the “Motherland”, to do the menial jobs that the natives felt were beneath their dignity.

Of course, accents played a part within the host countries themselves. In England, the accepted accent till the late 20th century for diplomats, the upper crust and the BBC was the Oxford/Cambridge variety, cultivated in the prestigious public (read private, expensive, snobbish) schools in the land. English is spoken with a multitude of accents depending on the locale in which you live. The Brummie (Birmingham) accent is different from the London cockney, the Liverpudlian from the West Country; and if you strike up a conversation with a Scotsman at a pub in Aberdeen, you will find it hard put to understand the drift of the conversation, especially had you slaked your thirst with that golden elixir, the hallmark of the nation.

The upper classes of colonial and post-colonial Sri Lanka, educated at Christian private mission schools, with the single exception of one government school in Colombo, often scoffed condescendingly at the English spoken in Sinhala and Tamil villages. As the hoary and offensive joke goes, when referring to an inhabitant from the Southern City of Galle, “You can take the boy out of Gaul, but you can’t take the Goal out of the boy!”

I emigrated to the USA in the late 80s, during the peak of the JVP and LTTE strife. I was amused, sometimes perturbed, to observe American attitudes to the accents of recent immigrants. The natives of the 50 states of this vast and powerful nation spoke English in their different accents; but American English had pretty much evolved into a uniform dialect.

As Theodore Roosevelt said at the turn of the 20th century, “We have room for but one language, the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house”. He has been proved largely prescient, though the recent influx of immigrants from Latin America and Asian countries has made for vast tracts of communities who speak only their own language, with a smattering of English to get by. This will change when their offspring join a new generation of Americans.

Generally, Americans have a combination of both inferiority and superiority complexes about the accent used in their nation when compared to the languages spoken in the “Old Country”. Each set of new immigrants till the middle of the 20th century added something of their own language/culture to the dialect now accepted as American English. First generation immigrants, however, usually retain the accents of the language they spoke at home, although many try to emulate the accents of the host country to demonstrate their eagerness to assimilate. Americans have formed their own conceptions, often stereotyped and fallacious, of the characteristics these various accents suggest.

Americans are generally in awe of those speaking with a British accent. Never mind the accent is OxCam or cockney, Welsh or Scots, these accents are often falsely regarded as evidence of an upper class education, even a status symbol. A French accent is admired as the mellifluous language of love and romance; such an accent, when accompanied with a gallant kiss on the hand, will make any lady, not just American, swoon. The Australian accent, which to my ears is just a variation of the lowly Cockney, is also held in high regard in the United States, while the guttural German is thought to be indicative of cold, even brutal, efficiency. Other European accents are held in varying degrees of esteem, depending on their national stereotypes. One accent that is universally enjoyed is the Jamaican, which opens up fantasies of warm beaches, cocktails with little umbrellas, reggae and calypso music and wild parties with a surfeit of sex and pot, lots of pot.

Sadly, the accent held in the least esteem are the discordant sounds of the English language spoken by first generation immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent, contemptuously personified by Apu in the popular TV show, “The Simpsons”. It has also been disdainfully described as an accent, when used by a man pursuing a woman, that would be the least likely to help him getting laid. Unless, of course, the lady in pursuit hailed from the Subcontinent, in which event a mere accent would likely prove to be least of the problems.

Many of these immigrants from the Subcontinent are highly educated professionals, medical, engineering, and the like. Their education has often been “refined” by the hallowed schools of learning in England. They take inordinate pride in their distinctive and cultured accents, and many refuse to parrot the pidgin American of their host nation. As an example, my brother emigrated to California over 40 years ago. He received his education up to MD General Medicine (Sri Lanka) and MRCP (UK), in Colombo. After a brief period of training at the University of Southern California, he has been teaching pathology at the USC Medical School for over 40 years, as the Head of Surgical Pathology of the most prestigious university in Los Angeles. Like me, he talks with the same English accent we learned at Royal College, which neither of us has been able to shed; me, after six years in England as a student and over 20 years in the United States, and my brother, after 40 years’ teaching pathology to American medical students. I asked him once why he didn’t adapt his accent to better communicate with his students, why he still used words like ‘nought’ and ‘fortnight’ which are unfamiliar to Americans. His typically arrogant Sri Lankan response was: “I am not going to change the way I speak. Let the buggers look up any words they don’t understand!”

Americans, and it must be confessed, even many of these educated immigrants from the Subcontinent, look down upon the grating accents of recent immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent, usually economic refugees of the “lower orders” with little education and fewer skills. They do their utmost to parrot the American accent in a desperate desire to blend in, efforts which unfortunately result in a bad accent made even more jarring.

When I first arrived in America in 1990, I met with some Sri Lankans living in the twilight zone of the undocumented immigrant, making great efforts to pursue the elusive American Dream. One of them, fresh out of LAX, heard a dog barking, and exclaimed, in Sinhala, with an air of wonderment, “Aday, machang, even the dogs here bark with an American accent”.

American prejudice against the accents of immigrants from the Subcontinent is a really yet another not so subtle expression of racism. I have personally suffered this form of discrimination, when insensitive American co-workers tried to mimic my accent in an effort to diminish me. My advanced age at the time (49), and lack of American work experience compelled me to take lowly, often menial jobs in an effort to put food on the table, secure medical insurance and pay the rent. But I never let these taunts take me down, because I knew I was better than them. I am not being arrogant or conceited, it was a low bar I had to clear. However, this kind of cruel mimicry can have a devastating effect on children, especially those in their formative years.

In Los Angeles, we made friends with an Indian family living in our apartment complex, who were in a similar situation. They had an only daughter, a beautiful and talented little girl, who attended the junior high school in the neighborhood. My friend and I shared the chore of taking our kids (my younger son had, during those first few days, enrolled in the local Community College) to school and picking them up at the end of the day, depending on our work schedules. I noticed that my friend’s little daughter looked very glum, sometimes close to tears when I picked her up after school. After a couple of weeks, concerned as only a father can feel for another’s obsessive need to protect his daughter, I decided to cross traditional lines of privacy and asked my friend if there were any problems with his daughter’s schooling. I thought maybe she had problems with adjustment to a new culture and a different curriculum. My friend broke down and told me the awful truth. Their daughter kept sobbing herself to sleep every night, in deep distress; she was being mocked for her Indian accent by the school bullies. He and his wife were at their wits’ end, even thinking of abandoning their quest for the American Dream and going back to India.

We talked to the scared, sensitive little girl, told her that she was better than any kid in the school; that she was better read and educated in the English language than most; that she should study hard and go on to complete her studies at the best university in the country. She tearfully agreed to try.

And try she did! She has exceeded even our most extravagant expectations. She gritted her teeth, bravely overcame the relentless taunts, won the English prize at the end of her junior school career, finished high school as its Valedictorian and earned a Summa cum Laude bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t stop there. She was accepted to Yale Law School, and is now a lawyer, the General Counsel at one of the nation’s leading philanthropic Foundations.

We have kept in touch with our Indian friends, and I am so enormously proud of their daughter’s achievements just as if she were my very own. In spite of the sad fact that she now speaks English with a perfect American accent.

Which is not to say that I haven’t been extraordinarily blessed with my two sons. They also took advantage of the wonderful educational opportunities available during the Clinton years to kids who were willing to work hard, and equipped themselves with degrees from equally prestigious universities. My pride in their achievements knows no bounds. And they have the added virtue of speaking English with just a trace of the accent we all learned at our alma mater, Royal College, Colombo.