By Rebecca Lin
As an immigrant in Canada, one question that I’d always ponder is that “How do I know where this person is from if he/she doesn’t have an accent?” Here’s the real question: What does it mean to “have an accent”? Are we assuming that certain accents are more superior than others? Or do we have a standard accent, and any other pronunciation methods would be considered as “foreign”?
Back home in Taiwan, the English education is usually delivered in an American context, so it’s natural for Taiwanese students to assume that the standard pronunciation is what they have been taught in school – the American accent. However, people also find the British accent quite elegant, I recall when Harry Potter became a fad in Taiwan, which was when I was still in primary school, people would intentionally speak in a British manner, some example would be “could you give me a glass of wo-tah (water)?” or “Oh, bloody hell!” Many years later, the BBC series Sherlock Holmes were released, this has took the world by storm, and that also includes Taiwan. Many people start to imitate the way the actors speak in the series, and people generally believe that having a British accent makes you sound more elegant and more sophisticated.
We can totally see a pattern here, in Taiwan, people tend to be drawn to western drama and films, and they would use those sources as their means of learning English, which was inherently a good thing, but then this would also mean that they would feel inferior when they couldn’t speak just like actors on screen or when other people sound more similar to their favourite actors. This phenomenon would only worsen when one move to a new country, even if they speak the language, they would feel out of place because their accents are not “perfect”.
According to research, people see those with accents that are similar to their own more positively than those with different accents (Edwards, 1982; Hurt & Weaver, 1980). Similarity in attitudes and features influences communication processes and perceptions formed, in line with the theoretical position advanced by Rubin (1981) and others (Sunnafrank, 1985). This work develops a three-part topology of accents, consisting of dissimilar, comparable, and nonaccented accents, based on this knowledge. As a result, while accents that are highly dissimilar from standard North American English may lead to less favourable perceptions of sources, accents that are more similar to it (such as the British accent) may lead to less harsh evaluations.
The common accent is referred to as nonaccent. For instance, Tom Brokaw’s middle-plains “newscaster” accent is not an accent. In this regard, we can infer that when someone said “you don’t have an accent”, that usually means that you speak in a way that they are more familiar with.
Questions to consider:
1. Do you think you have a “good accent”? What makes you think that way?
2. How do we change our perception about which accents are better than another?
Edwards, J. R. (1982). Language attitudes and their implications among English speakers. In E. B. Ryan & H. Giles (Eds.), Attitudes toward language variation (pp. 20-33). London: Edward Arnold.
Hurt, H. T. & Weaver, C. H. (1972). Negro dialect, ethno-centricism, and the distortion of information in the communicative process. Central States Speech Journal, 23, 118-125.
Sunnafrank, M. (1985). Attitude similarity and interpersonal attraction during early communicative relationships: A research note on the generalizability of findings to opposite sex relationships. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 49, 73-80.
