Why You Shouldnt Judge An Accent

[Music]

i judge a book by its cover once

and now i research why you shouldn’t do

it was late 2007 i just started

university

and all i could think was here are my

adulthood years i’m 18 years old now i

should own my life like all adults do

and read some non-fiction books that’s

what adult thing is right

my degree was in french so i went to

this french bookstore on a saturday

morning

and of all the books i was drawn into

senegal paris the little prince

i looked at the cover amazed by how

lightweight it was

and i slowly put it down and i thought

wow why did they leave a children’s book

in adult section

such an adult comment to make six months

later

the little prince was an assigned book

in my french literature class

when i read it aside from developing a

long-lasting addiction to each sentence

i felt ashamed i thought if i hadn’t

been given this opportunity to read the

little prince

i would have missed the most impactful

story of my life

now years later as a language scientist

i go after moments of snapshot judgments

such as judging up

by its cover but instead of trying to

understand how we judge books by their

covers

i try to understand how we judge others

accents by their looks

now an accent is a paradoxical element

in itself

it exists in all of us but most of us do

not want to have it

to say you have an accent is to

acknowledge that a part of you is

different than

others and in some ways

acknowledging this can make you stand

out in a crowd and we are all social

animals

we don’t like to be left out but i’ve

been most interested in accents when

they occur

as a result of bilingualism which is

when you acquire a second language

for instance if someone in finland

decides learning english as a second

language

they might have some reminiscence of

finnish in their english

this is an organic feature of learning a

second language it’s nothing to be

afraid of

and in fact it shows the unique paths

each and every one of us take

and thank goodness we sound slightly

different than each other

shows that we are humans and not

machines

as a multilingual adult i myself have my

unique accent and you’re already hearing

in fact it’s so unique that at the

beginning of each semester

it leads to a class long discussion i

often ask my students to guess where

they think i’m from

and i receive some of the most charming

place guesses

from brazil to japan my all-time

favorite is

mars i learned english when i moved to

canada from turkey in 2012.

before then i was somewhat exposed to

english but i never experienced speaking

my first years of using english were

made up of sentences

in a yodesh way but without the wiseness

and i aside from the word order i had

difficulty pronouncing these th

sounds and i still clearly remember one

cold morning

even though all mornings are cold in

canada i walk into pharmacy and i ask

what can i use for this huge blister on

my thumb

and you know you never know what you did

wrong when people start laughing and

disapproving at the same time

well no matter what i do no matter how

embarrassing a mistake i make

i came to the conclusion that this is

who i am

and when i reached this conclusion i

realized with the

coldest truth i was privileged enough to

laugh at my accent

and constantly make fun of it because

i’m white

but in fact my accent was found to be

funny

charming and even sophisticated but an

indian english speaker’s accent is found

to be incomprehensible

unintelligible and not sophisticated and

this is the part where i realize that

the snapshot judgments that people had

of me

differ towards that they had towards

other people

and i didn’t like it because i didn’t

want to miss another impactful story of

my life

just because of our brains snapshot

judgments

as a scientist i i had to do something

about it so i delved into bilingualism

and let me begin with this being a

bilingual is awesome

a plethora of research shows that when

you acquire a second language your brain

turns into a giant gym

all of a sudden different parts of your

brain start exercising

research even shows that being a

bilingual protects from

neurodegenerative diseases such as the

alzheimer’s disease

learning a new language contributes to

happy and healthy aging

which makes sense because the older we

get the smaller our social circles

become

but with more languages we have access

to more individuals

if bilingualism is this awesome why do

we then stigmatize it so much by

focusing on accents or judging people’s

accented speech

well the answer is in our brains our

brains become experts of the information

that we provide to them

systematically once you acquire your

first language

that language invades and shapes a lot

of things in your brain

the fact that you can tell that i’m not

a native speaker of english is because

your brain knows what american english

sounds sound like

and any little variation can be detected

and probably by now you have these loud

alarms in your brain saying that he is

not a native speaker

which is fine i’m fine with that but

then the issue gets really complicated

when our brains start hearing

non-existing accents

in my dissertation research i work on

this illusion

i pair pictures of faces with american

british and indian english

imagine seeing someone’s face on a

computer screen and listening to

sentences

in one condition with a south asian face

another condition with a white face

in short the only thing that was

changing was the faces

participants task was to listen to those

sentences type them down

and judge if the speaker had an accent

or not

results show that when paired with a

white face it didn’t matter much what

type of variety they were listening to

they didn’t have any difficulty typing

down those sentences

but something strange happened when we

switched faces from white faces

to south asian faces all of a sudden

participants had really hard times

typing down those sentences

they even found american english as

being accented

faces impact how we hear others we judge

others

by their covers however the most

striking results show that

participants who had more racial

diversity in their social surroundings

did not differ in terms of their

judgments towards south asian faces and

white faces

which suggests that with more racial

diversity in our social surroundings

you can actually not use those snapshot

judgments

now these results have huge implications

for a place like florida

where a good portion of the population

grow in multilingual houses

can you imagine how you can judge

someone by just looking at their face

without listening to their voice would

that

future impact you your loved ones

we’re now living in a world where

machines take over some parts of our

lives by convenience

if you don’t acknowledge our accidents

now none of our accidents will be

acknowledged in the future

imagine calling 911 machine answers and

that machine cannot understand your

speech because

it was programmed by someone who assumed

that accidents are only funny things to

laugh at in tv shows

in fact during the times of health

crisis and pandemics such as covet 19

individuals who speak english as a

second language have faced some of the

harshest

outcomes of these crises what if your

children apply for jobs or

schools and their applications are

disqualified by algorithms that cannot

recognize their voices

what if your bank won’t identify your

voice

what if you try re-entering your home

country from abroad

and the automated custom service cannot

understand your speech

in fact some of these are already

happening in a different platform

there was a recent incident where face

recognition program couldn’t recognize

people of color’s faces

because it was only programmed for white

faces

before it happens to our voices let’s

make it count this time

what can we do about it well first let’s

not make fun of an accent

if somebody makes fun of an accent let’s

raise our voices

let’s have children listen to people

from more diverse backgrounds

let’s give our students more

opportunities to interact with our

international teaching assistants

let’s give our accents their

let’s allow accents to live their lives

in our lives

they’re not going to harm our language

they’re not going to change who we are

they should be allowed to stay with us

on our unique paths

and let’s not shy away from the reality

we all have accents

some may be more similar than others but

they don’t mean any harm

i would like to end on a personal note

with a challenging story

you’re looking at me right now seeing a

language scientist working on accents

maybe you wouldn’t see a struggling past

and maybe my face covers it all

but don’t judge me by my cover

what if i told you you just finished

listening to a trans person

who is fortunate to be alive let alone

to be on the stage

i struggled with my own voice for over

26 years

and now that i found it it’s my goal to

help others

to hold on to their voices

it might be hard for some to accept but

we can all exist in this world

the paradox begins when we question

whether we can coexist at all

the reality is we’ve been coexisting for

a very long time we just don’t want to

give ourselves the credit

as a language scientist and someone with

a struggling past i can assure you that

this is not hard at all

all we need to do is instead of using

words to describe our relationships

we experience our relationships so next

time when you look someone in the face

instead of thinking about all the labels

or words that you can use to describe

them

think about all the endless

opportunities that you can share with

them

just like senegal period did with the

little prince