Picture this:
You are at a job interview. Things are going great. Things are going really really great. The interviewer loves you and you are told you can start Monday. Yay! ... But there is a catch. They tell you that in order to work there, you have to hide your real accent and fake another one. What would you do?
You probably don't think much about accents, but they are a big thing for me since I am a language coach. My students want to sound as close to a native speaker as possible, and they spend a lot of time and money trying to get there.
We all accept that the vast majority of us are not going to sound 100% native when we speak a foreign language. My English is quite good, but I am still asked by strangers where I come from at least twice a week, as soon as they hear me speak. A bit annoying after all these years but fine.
However there is a different kind of accent that we tend to forget or ignore. The one we have when we speak our own native language.
Your accent is shaped by where you live(d) and, yes, the social group you belong to. In other words: people in close contact tend to copy one another. The problem is that you often just forget you have an accent yourself. It’s only when you hear someone from a different region or social group you notice THEY have an accent. This is particularly prominent when you happen to speak the "standarized accent" of a country (controversial term that, in short, refers to the accent used by the guys broadcasting news on your national TV).
So yes. You have an accent. We all do. Just as you have a skin color, a sexual orientation, your particular religious views and many other things that make you the cool human being that you are.
Most of us (and rightly so) have learned to be disturbed, disgusted and offended by all kinds of discrimination. Because if I discriminate against you for what you are, what I am saying is that you are inferior, and that is just wrong.
But at the end of the day "discrimination" is a very broad term defined by each society during one particular time. For example in Spain, the country where I grew up, everybody would go bananas if a job posting said the company was seeking “Catholic, straight, white candidates”. On the other hand, it is still totally common to post a job offer seeking “pretty girls in their 20's”. Such a job posting would be outrageously illegal in the States, but in Spain nobody even thinks about it. Go figure...
But hey, let's get real. Maybe things here are not as clean and perfect as political correctness might suggest. Last night I went to grab a beer with friends. 100% of the servers (and there were a lot of them) were white, pretty girls in their 20s. Had this chubby 40 year old applied for a job there, I think my accent would have been the least of my problems.
I don't know if it's OK or not that a business owner decides to have a very specific profile of workers where one particular gender or age group will get the job every time. I am sure there will be different opinions there, and that is a good topic of conversation for you to consider. I just think it's important that we keep things real and say out loud that there is discrimination out there and we just need to decide what is OK and what's not.
Question is:
Are accents one of the last acceptable OPEN areas of discrimination?
Back to my original story, I found myself in a situation in which I was told that, in order to work for a language school, my accent would not be acceptable. And remember this, I am a Spanish tutor from Spain and my job was to speak in Spanish. So this had nothing to do with me having an accent when I spoke English. The issue was me having an accent when I speak my native language.
I was told most of the students in the school were accustomed to a Mexican accent and therefore, I would have to speak like a Mexican and even lie to my students about where I come from. The situation got even funnier when the interviewer tried to teach me how to imitate a Mexican accent (even though he was an American and his Spanish was broken and basic to begin with). It was quite surreal.
I really didn't see that coming, and I was so in shock that all I was able to say was that I would not do that. I stood up, thanked him for his time and consideration and left the place feeling quite confused about the whole thing. It was only when I got home I started to get real angry about it. Was this a case of “accentism”? Had I just been discriminated against?
I wrote the school a long email expressing my anger and disappointment about the whole situation. Later in the day and, to my surprise, I got an email back from them denying the whole incident. They said the whole accent conversation never happened. Obviously they were too clever to leave an electronic trail. It became a "your word against mine" thing and I had to leave it at that. At least karma got them, and the school went bankrupt soon after.
I get the feeling that “accentism” happens more than we tend to believe. I just don't have the numbers because nonone is talking about it, as far as I am know. But I wonder: Is it harder for someone with a strong Alabama accent to find a job in Chicago than it is for someone born in the Windy city? It sure is harder to find a job on TV where 99% of broadcasters and hosts seem to share the same accent. And I suspect TV is not, by far, the only place where this happens. Is “ACCENTISM” a thing? Should we all fight against it?
US Federal law prohibits discrimination based on national origin, which includes a person's ancestry, birthplace, culture, or surnames associated with a particular ethnicity. Since the language an employee speaks and the accent an employee uses are often associated with national origin I am quite sure that I was a victim of discrimination. From that point of view I think discrimation against your State accent would be harder to prevent (as unfair as this might be).
Dr Alexander Baratta from Manchester University claimed that prejudice towards certain regional accents is forcing many people to change the way they speak in order to fit in, making them feel "fake" and thinks that "accentism" should be treated as seriously as sexism and racism.
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