To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Saturday, April 13, 2019
 
I was interacting with this girl since a few months in a professional context. Her name struck me as being European though her accent was quite distinctly American. I was curious to know more about how she acquired this accent but it might have seemed too forward of me to enquire in the presence of other people so I simply assumed she may have been brought up in the US or something like that. Her views also struck me as in some way American (or my impression of American) as was her overall demeanour which was confident and non-self-conscious. 

A few days ago we happened to be the only people in the room and I finally asked her if she was American. She laughed and said that she was from Hungary but she got that a lot. I asked her how she might have developed this accent… if she watched a lot of American TV shows or movies (I had found during my trip to Iceland that people there spoke in an American accent because of their high exposure to American media). She said that she rarely watched American shows; in fact, she watched more British stuff…only some American news on YouTube perhaps. She said that she found it quite curious herself that people thought she had an American accent and some even guessed it to be an Australian accent.

After this exchange, I couldn’t help asking myself if all along my perception of her accent had created some unconscious bias towards the content of her speech too. Which also made me wonder if five years ago, say before Trump, the American accent would have had a different kind of impact on me? I remember reading somewhere that Americans tend to automatically assume anything said in a British accent to be more cerebral or intelligent… which probably also shows that we tend to attach some sort of cultural value to an accent? And this cultural evaluation also keeps shifting perhaps in light of major media events such as in the case of the US?
All this led me to wonder, how do people in a global environment perceive the content of what I say by how I say it, that is, my Indian accent? My Indian accent is not at all pronounced (even if I say so myself! :)) but it is distinctly Indian for all that. So what effect does my Indian accent have on the way my message is received? It seems to me that it would be overly simplistic to say that people don’t go beyond the accent at all but I am of the view that it does play a role. If the message is considered as good as the cultural accent in which it is uttered, then for some it means less work because anything that is said would at least have a basic credibility, and for some it means a lot more work because they have to establish credibility of the message in a voice that is not perceived as credible in its own right.
 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 2:23 am 2 comments
HOME