Despite what you may have read on Facebook this morning, the world is a pretty good place these days. Sure, we've got some battles left to fight, and there will always be some big social change or medical advancement just over the horizon, but statistically speaking, it's better to be alive today than it was 100 years ago. People live longer, have more opportunity, and get along better than almost any other time in history.
But we've still got plenty of discrimination. And while there are battles being fought against all of these other kinds of discrimination, everyone is ignoring a very common form. If you know me, you won't be surprised to find out that I'm talking about a language related discrimination.
But it's not really language. It's accent. I'm talking about accent bias.
Let's get something out of the way here, because I don't want to see any comments that say this. Every English speaking person has an accent. There is no such thing as standard English. Depending on where you're from, you may ignore your r's or accentuate them heavily. Where I'm from, the predominant speech pattern tends to remove t's from the middle of a word. It may not make you sound completely foreign to whoever it is you're talking to, but everybody has an accent.
This isn't the first time I've written about this. But it's become very personal to me recently. See, I have a friend. She's from the eastern US, though not the eastern seaboard. She grew up in the Appalachian region of the country, where the majority of residents speak with a very pronounced accent. The accent shares a lot of pronunciations and structures with several deep south accents, though there are elements of northern accents in it as well.
Now most people have heard this accent, though usually it's flawed, and you only hear it on TV. Most of you would call it a southern accent, even though there are plenty of differences. And I want you to be honest with yourself. What do you think of a person when you hear them speaking with a southern or Appalachian accent? Are they poor? Probably on welfare? No job, spend all their time sitting in rotting recliners with a mason jar full of beer watching satellite on a big screen TV from Rent-a-center in a single-wide trailer that's falling to pieces around them? You probably think that person is a drain on society, don't you? Are there people who speak with this accent that live like that? Sure.
But the better question is, are there people who talk like you that live that way? And the answer is, yes. The percentage of the population isn't demonstrably different between the two accents, either. So why do you assume that someone who speaks with a southern accent is simple, stupid, or poor? Why do you assume anything about anyone based on the way they lift their words at the end or drop the g off of the "ing" construction?
Well, for the same reason anybody is prejudice about anything. You were taught that as a child, and now you're a bigot. No, you don't mean to be, no, you aren't committing violent acts against people that don't talk the same way as you. But how often do you think someone is mocked or otherwise harmed for speaking a certain way by children, colleagues, or employers? It's more prevalent than you think.
I'm going to go ahead and say that after living among people speaking with an Appalachian accent for several years, I love it. The way they say words and form sentences would sound simple and relaxed to a mid-westerner, but I would submit that it's far more efficient than whatever it is Hollywood wants us to think is "standard English." And I mean that. People out there can communicate more with three words and just such an inflection than I can in two or three sentences. Linguistically speaking, their spoken language is superior to mine. In addition to that, it's pretty. And I'm not speaking metaphorically or something, it's literally nice to listen to, making almost every conversation feel like a song. A very communicative, efficient, beautiful song.
But how the accent sounds to my ear doesn't matter. Let's go back to that friend I was telling you about up there. She's come out the Rockies for college, and she's brought her accent with her. As I said, the accent is beautiful. But it's also unimportant. However she pronounces her vowels, she is intelligent, strong, independent, kind, and frankly one of the best young women I've ever known.
It takes a while to learn that about a person. But it takes exactly no time at all to form an oft incorrect opinion about a person based on their appearance or the way they speak. She looks like all the girls out here (though in better shape than most. She could beat you up, trust me), but she doesn't sound like them. And they've been taught that people who sound like her are stupid, narrow-minded, and poor by some combination of their upbringing and popular culture.
And that makes me mad. Really, really mad. No person has any more right to judge another human being based on their accent than they do to profile somebody based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. It's no different! It bears the same fruits as any other social discrimination, and has no more basis in fact!
So why aren't we talking about this? Why is this still okay? In many places in this country and around the English speaking world there are battles being fought against racism and sexism and many other worthy causes. But I don't see any flags being hoisted over the battle for accent equality. There are no lines being drawn here. It's still socially acceptable to put a character in a movie or TV show and use their accent to characterize them as evil, stupid, or funny. If you want to make it in the professional world with anything approaching a "strong accent," better get started on those speech therapy classes and learn how to speak "standard English."
Am I saying that the world is evil? No. You see the seeds of change everywhere, and it's mostly change for the better. The world is a pretty good place right now. But it can get better. This is one way that it should.
So why is no one talking about this?
But we've still got plenty of discrimination. And while there are battles being fought against all of these other kinds of discrimination, everyone is ignoring a very common form. If you know me, you won't be surprised to find out that I'm talking about a language related discrimination.
But it's not really language. It's accent. I'm talking about accent bias.
Let's get something out of the way here, because I don't want to see any comments that say this. Every English speaking person has an accent. There is no such thing as standard English. Depending on where you're from, you may ignore your r's or accentuate them heavily. Where I'm from, the predominant speech pattern tends to remove t's from the middle of a word. It may not make you sound completely foreign to whoever it is you're talking to, but everybody has an accent.
This isn't the first time I've written about this. But it's become very personal to me recently. See, I have a friend. She's from the eastern US, though not the eastern seaboard. She grew up in the Appalachian region of the country, where the majority of residents speak with a very pronounced accent. The accent shares a lot of pronunciations and structures with several deep south accents, though there are elements of northern accents in it as well.
Now most people have heard this accent, though usually it's flawed, and you only hear it on TV. Most of you would call it a southern accent, even though there are plenty of differences. And I want you to be honest with yourself. What do you think of a person when you hear them speaking with a southern or Appalachian accent? Are they poor? Probably on welfare? No job, spend all their time sitting in rotting recliners with a mason jar full of beer watching satellite on a big screen TV from Rent-a-center in a single-wide trailer that's falling to pieces around them? You probably think that person is a drain on society, don't you? Are there people who speak with this accent that live like that? Sure.
But the better question is, are there people who talk like you that live that way? And the answer is, yes. The percentage of the population isn't demonstrably different between the two accents, either. So why do you assume that someone who speaks with a southern accent is simple, stupid, or poor? Why do you assume anything about anyone based on the way they lift their words at the end or drop the g off of the "ing" construction?
Well, for the same reason anybody is prejudice about anything. You were taught that as a child, and now you're a bigot. No, you don't mean to be, no, you aren't committing violent acts against people that don't talk the same way as you. But how often do you think someone is mocked or otherwise harmed for speaking a certain way by children, colleagues, or employers? It's more prevalent than you think.
I'm going to go ahead and say that after living among people speaking with an Appalachian accent for several years, I love it. The way they say words and form sentences would sound simple and relaxed to a mid-westerner, but I would submit that it's far more efficient than whatever it is Hollywood wants us to think is "standard English." And I mean that. People out there can communicate more with three words and just such an inflection than I can in two or three sentences. Linguistically speaking, their spoken language is superior to mine. In addition to that, it's pretty. And I'm not speaking metaphorically or something, it's literally nice to listen to, making almost every conversation feel like a song. A very communicative, efficient, beautiful song.
But how the accent sounds to my ear doesn't matter. Let's go back to that friend I was telling you about up there. She's come out the Rockies for college, and she's brought her accent with her. As I said, the accent is beautiful. But it's also unimportant. However she pronounces her vowels, she is intelligent, strong, independent, kind, and frankly one of the best young women I've ever known.
It takes a while to learn that about a person. But it takes exactly no time at all to form an oft incorrect opinion about a person based on their appearance or the way they speak. She looks like all the girls out here (though in better shape than most. She could beat you up, trust me), but she doesn't sound like them. And they've been taught that people who sound like her are stupid, narrow-minded, and poor by some combination of their upbringing and popular culture.
And that makes me mad. Really, really mad. No person has any more right to judge another human being based on their accent than they do to profile somebody based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. It's no different! It bears the same fruits as any other social discrimination, and has no more basis in fact!
So why aren't we talking about this? Why is this still okay? In many places in this country and around the English speaking world there are battles being fought against racism and sexism and many other worthy causes. But I don't see any flags being hoisted over the battle for accent equality. There are no lines being drawn here. It's still socially acceptable to put a character in a movie or TV show and use their accent to characterize them as evil, stupid, or funny. If you want to make it in the professional world with anything approaching a "strong accent," better get started on those speech therapy classes and learn how to speak "standard English."
Am I saying that the world is evil? No. You see the seeds of change everywhere, and it's mostly change for the better. The world is a pretty good place right now. But it can get better. This is one way that it should.
So why is no one talking about this?
Of course you are right. I have met lawyers, doctors and mining engineers with that lovely Appalachian accent. I asked an acquaintance there how we sounded to her. She said we spoke too fast and didn't say our vowels properly. Her husband's name was Bill...and we said it so fast it hardly seemed a name at all. Her pronunciation was more like a soft, drawn out Bee-ull.
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