JPB Gerald, our first guest blogger of 2022, is an EdD candidate at CUNY – Hunter College in Instructional Leadership, and a theorist seeking justice for the racially, linguistically, and neurologically minoritized. He identifies as Black and neurodivergent, though he spent most of his life unaware of the latter. He hosts a podcast called Unstandardized English, and has had his writing published in academic journals, practitioner magazines, and national newspapers. His first book, on the harm caused by the centering of whiteness in language education, will be published by Multilingual Matters in early 2023. He lives with his wife, young son, and dog in New York, on stolen Munsee Lenape and Canarsie territory.
Much research has been done into the way that raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) seep into how spoken accents are perceived. Workers who do not fit the visual image of the white native speaker are forced to perform the aesthetic labour of attempting to look and sound the right way (Ramjattan, 2019a; 2019b), while they are often doomed to be viewed as less valuable because of the bodies they inhabit, even if they would otherwise be categorized as a “native speaker” (Faez, 2012). Indeed, relying upon this native/non-native binary allows the fiction of supposedly inferior accents to persist, and there are a great deal of companies that prey upon the genuine fear and pain of potential clients. In this blog post, excerpted from a book to be released next year, I will look at the way a few of these companies market their offerings, in the hopes that I can demonstrate the deceit and the harm at the heart of the accent reduction industry. In researching this work, what I found was that not only was accent reduction expensive, but that it reveals the false premise on which it is built as soon as you look beneath the surface.
If you visit the website for a company called “Accent Advisor,” you will be told (as of Winter 2022) that there are three packages available for an individual to purchase. The “best value” is $18 per 25-minute lesson, with lessons three times a week, which is $54/week. The “most popular option” is $19.50 per 25-minute lesson, with lessons twice a week ($39/week). And the third option, called “Lite,” is $24 per lesson, once a week. If you can’t make up your mind, the single lesson has a sad van in the background, the middle option has an airplane, and the “best value” has a satellite, because your accent will be reduced… astronomically? (Accent Advisor, n.d.) It goes without saying that despite their assurances that these prices are affordable, only a small number of people can afford to pay $25-50 dollars a week over several months to “correct” what isn’t actually a problem.
Consider, what are they actually offering their clients? Their tagline is, “We help people speak with an American accent.” I’m sure it’s not a Chicano accent or a Southern Black accent, despite those being American. “Speak Confidently,” they promise. “Many foreigners have a wide variety of speaking patterns that seem strange to Americans. Our coaches can help you understand these potential areas of difficulty. You’ll learn a wide variety of tones that help you put the right feelings behind the things you say.” Yikes. But I can’t just pick on “Accent Advisor,” because they are only one of ever so many companies engaging in this sort of work. Here’s the sort of advertisement you can easily come across:
A different company, “Accents Off” (what a name!), which has a tagline of “Speech and Voice Improvement” (Accents Off, n.d.), commands its potential clients to “Be clear, be confident, be heard,” and says that by signing up with them, you can “realize your potential in business and in life.” In business, eh? These companies give lip service to equity, of course; it’s bad optics if you don’t. “Accents Off” asks, “What’s wrong with having an accent? Nothing! Accents contribute to our global diversity.” But then they say, “In today’s competitive job market, clear communication is an asset high on every employer’s priority list.” First, the conflation of “clear communication” and certain more acceptable accents is troublesome. Additionally, take note of how frequently the language of commerce appears in these promotions, not to mention the implication that “an accent” is something that is inherently foreign.
There’s a clue about the deceit at the core of this concept though. “Accents Off” includes the following: “Your native accent will always be a part of who you are. You can switch back into your original accent whenever you want—but eliminating the “hard edges” of your non-native accent will make for a much smoother cultural and professional transition.” So, first of all, anyone visiting this site is deeply mired in the native/non-native binary, but that is to be expected of companies that depend upon this concept to convince clients that their accents are a problem. Second, it’s clear that this entire enterprise of accent reduction is based around the idea that assimilation into societal norms is the pragmatic approach. Third, “hard edges” is a deeply stigmatizing way to describe someone’s speech. Finally, the fact that they say clients can “switch back into” their normal speech patterns is rather telling of the fact that, despite their name, they aren’t actually offering to “reduce” anyone’s accent (or, in their parlance, take their accents “off”). If anything, this subfield is, at best, teaching people how to perform a new accent, the way that a professional actor might when preparing for a role. For actors, they tend to call this dialect coaching, something that can absolutely be conducted in a respectful way; for these students, however, companies are preying upon their implied fears of financial instability to sell them expensive reinforcement of the fact that their own speech is less valuable, with zero engagement of the reality that it is, of course, the white perceiving subject (Flores & Rosa, 2015) who has done the devaluing. So long as we continue to ignore – or, more accurately, allow white-led companies to insist – that the problem lies within racialized languagers and not within the white listener responsible for judging “non-native” speech, this harmful cycle will continue.
There are further clues to the troubles with so-called “accent reduction” throughout the websites of this company and other similar ones. “Sankin Speech Improvement” pitches its services accordingly: “Are you tired of people asking, ‘Where are you from?’ Have people said, ‘Welcome to the US’ even though you have lived here for over ten years? Are you often asked to repeat yourself? Do you feel that others are distracted by the way that you speak and therefore are not listening to what you are saying?” (Sankin Speech Improvement, n.d.) These are real, painful, and all-too-common experiences for people who are classified as outside the boundaries of native speech, but the solution is not for the people on the receiving end of this treatment to seek help for a problem that supposedly resides within them.
The list of “accent reduction” websites is endless, and, unfortunately, would not exist were it not successful. The only way we can break free from the reliance on this deceit is to be honest about the role of the white perceivers. In other words, as members of the field of language education, we need to flip the script and pour our money and energy into training white audiences to understand unfamiliar speech, and into rewarding those who can understand more types of speech instead of convincing racialized languagers to compete against one another for how closely they can resemble the idealized English user. Ultimately, we simply need to tell the truth about who is falling short, because it is not the people being asked where they’re from – it’s the people asking the question.
The full text in which a version of this excerpt appears will be published in early 2023 by Multilingual Matters.
References
Accent Advisor. (n.d.). Retrieved from Accent Advisor: https://english.accentadvisor.com/
Accents Off. (n.d.). Retrieved from Accents Off: https://accentsoff.com/
Faez, F. (2012). Linguistic identities and experiences of generation 1.5 teacher candidates: Race matters. TESL Canada Journal, 124-141.
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 149-172.
Ramjattan, V. (2019). Racializing the problem of and solution to foreign accent in business. Applied Linguistics Review, 1-18.
Ramjattan, V. (2019). The white native speaker and inequality regimes in the private English language school. Intercultural Education, 126-140.
Sankin Speech Improvement. (n.d.). Retrieved from Sankin Speech Improvement: https://www.sankinspeechimprovement.com/non-native-speakers-accent-elimination-and-modification/
