Roberto Rey Agudo The New York Times Opinion July 14 2018 I have an accent So do you I am an immigrant who has spent nearly as

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Roberto Rey Agudo The New York Times Opinion July 14 2018 I have an accent So do you I am an immigrant who has spent nearly as much time in the United States as I have in my home country Spain I am also the director of Dartmouth s language programs in Spanish and Portuguese Living as I do deeply immersed in the work of teaching and learning second languages it was fun to watch the FX drama The Americans in which the main characters aptitude for languages was so central to the plot of being KGB agents able to hide in plain sight by speaking perfect standard American English perceived by many to be American English spoken with no accent Nonetheless the premise that you can speak a language without any accent at all is a loaded one You can t actually do this Worse when we fetishize certain accents and disdain others it can lead to real discrimination in job interviews performance evaluations and access to housing to name just a few of the areas where having or not having a certain accent has profound consequences Too often at the hospital or the bank in the office or at a restaurant even in the classroom we embrace the idea that there is a right way for our words to sound and that the perfect accent is one that is not just inaudible but also invisible unmarked or not heard If you look at the question from a sociolinguistic point of view having no accent is plainly impossible An accent is simply a way of speaking shaped by a combination of geography social class education ethnicity and first language I have one you have one everybody has one There is no such thing as perfect neutral or unaccented English or Spanish for that matter or any other language To say that someone does not have an accent is as believable as saying that someone does not have any facial features We know this but it is worth reminding ourselves of it again and again No one speaks without an accent Instead when we say someone doesn t have an accent we mean that their accent is unmarked meaning we don t hear it as different When we say that someone speaks with an accent we generally mean one of two things 1 a nonnative accent or 2 a so called nonstandard accent In both cases what we are really saying is that the accent of the speaker is marked or rather heard as different Both can have consequences for their speakers because sociolinguistic research has shown that people do discriminate on the basis of accent The privileged status of the standard or unmarked accent is of course rooted in education and socioeconomic power The standard accent is not necessarily the same as the highest status accent It is simply the dominant accent the one you are most likely to hear in the media the one that is considered neutral Nonstandard native accents like African American Vernacular English or Cockney are also underrepresented or misrepresented in the media L ike nonnative accents they are likely to be stereotyped and mocked underscor ing the layered status attached to particular ways of speaking Further not all nonnative accents are perceived in the same way For example in the US some accents like those of native French speakers of English carry social power that other accents do not carry Such judgments are purely social to linguists the t distinctions are arbitrary and based on biases about social factors like race class gender geographical region However the notion of the neutral perfect accent is so pervasive that speakers with stigmatized accents often internalize the prejudice they face When you are learning a language particularly as a nonnative speaker a marked or noticed accent is usually also accompanied by other features like limited vocabulary or grammatical mistakes In the classroom we understand that this is a normal stage in the development of proficiency My family back in Madrid would have a hard time understanding the Spanish of my native English speaking students in my first semester classroom Later these same students study abroad in Barcelona or Cuzco or Buenos Aires and often struggle to make themselves understood It s certainly true that a marked noticed accent can get in the way of making yourself understood ESL learners and others are well advised to work on their pronunciation As at teacher I do try to lead my students toward some version of that flawed ideal the native accent One of the ironies in this is that I along with most of my fellow teachers from the 20 countries not counting the US territory of Puerto Rico where Spanish is an official language long ago shed the specific regional class shaped intonations and vocabulary that are or once were our native accents My point is not that we need to forget the aim of easily comprehensible communication obviously that remains the goal But we do need to set aside the illusion that there is a single true and authentic way to speak English is a global language with many native and nonnative varieties Worldwide nonnative speakers of English outnumber natives by a ratio of three to one Even in the United States which has the largest population of native English speakers there are nearly 50 million speakers of English as a second third or other language What does it even mean to sound native when so many English speakers are second language speakers In most cases it is counterproductive to hold unmarked unnoticed pronunciation as the bar you have to clear Accent by itself is a shallow measure of language proficiency the linguistic equivalent of judging people by their looks Instead we should become aware of our linguistic biases and learn to listen more deeply before forming judgments How large and how varied is the person s vocabulary Can she participate in most daily interactions How much detail can he provide when retelling something Can she hold her own in an argument Language discrimination based on accent is not merely an academic idea Experiments show that people tend to make negative stereotypical assumptions about speakers with a nonnative accent The effect extends all the way to bias against native speakers whose name or ethnicity reads as foreign Studies show that when nonnative speakers and speakers with nonstandard accents respond to advertisements for housing their conversations with prospective landlords are more likely to be unsuccessful on average than those of callers without marked accents

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