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
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
it
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
it
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