When I was in acting school in New York, we were required to take speech classes to perfect our voice and diction skills. Part of the coursework involved learning the “standard American” dialect that would mask our natural accents. Standard American is easy to understand—free of regional twangs and local color. Being from northern Ohio, I never really had a glaring accent, but there were people in my class who were not so lucky. My friend Jenny from Georgia had a particularly rough time, even when learning to pronounce our teacher’s name as “Wendy” and not “Windy.” I didn’t think her accent was obvious, but even a little bit of a Southern inflection to her speech was enough to make Shakespeare sound like Steel Magnolias, and it wasn’t pretty. The girl from Long Island had it even worse.
As drama students, we learned that accent elimination was the only way to get work in the entertainment world and we had to learn to shape-shift and present ourselves as blank canvases. These days, accent reduction has become de rigueur for all breeds of professionals, from newscasters to insurance adjusters. People don’t just eliminate their accents for the purpose of job interviews; their new neutral speech becomes a way of life, whether they’re giving a presentation to a client or having brunch with friends. A quick internet search will reveal dozens of programs, from classes to cassette tapes, all designed to help people lose their accents and function more fluidly in American culture. For someone whose primary language isn’t English, the goal is easy—to perfect their standard American dialect. Heavy foreign accents can cause people to be heard incorrectly and forced to repeat themselves, becoming a professional liability. Although companies can’t discriminate based on national origin, they can indeed hire and fire based on a person’s communication skills, so everyone wants to be understood crystal-clearly.
Battling Bias
People from the South, the Midwest, or other areas where accents are standard don’t have the same troubles making themselves understood, but they, too, feel an intense pressure to eliminate their accent in order to advance their careers or improve their social standing. It’s because we have an innate and pernicious belief that there’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” to speak American English. The right way is the flat, affectless American dialect we hear on TV and in movies. Anything else is the wrong way, and there’s a deep cultural bias against incorrect speech.
Although linguists know that accents don’t predict a person’s intelligence, many people have prejudices about them. In America, distinct local dialects can be found in Boston (“go pahk the cah in the yahd”), the Midwest (“yah, you betcha!”), and New York (“fuhgeddaboudit”), although no accent is as much maligned as a Southern accent. One of my co-workers who was raised in Virginia was cautioned that if she ever expected to be taken seriously in the academic world, she’d have to ditch her accent. People ascribe their ideas about an accent’s region of origin to its speakers. That means that since people stereotype Southerners as uneducated, racist rednecks, they assume that everyone with a Southern accent is inherently unintelligent. People assume that New Yorkers are rude, brusque, and brash, and their harsh perception of the New York accent reflects that. People also have extremely negative stereotypes about another common American accent, the street slang usually referred to as Ebonics.
The innate belief is that the flat, affectless speech of places like Michigan, California, and Washington DC is the standard and any other kind of speech is a deviation from the norm. Since that’s mostly what we hear in movies and on TV, it’s a way of speaking that’s assumed to correlate with intelligence, education, and sophistication. Movies, television, and pop culture aren’t exactly helping to dispel stereotypes about accents, either. Whenever a character is supposed to be rural or stupid, there’s a good chance that they’ll have a Southern accent. On the other hand, shady contractors, Mafia dons, and tightly-wound financiers sound like they’re from New York. Plus there’s the stereotype of the ignorant street thug speaking Ebonics and the inbred mountain man with the Appalachian drawl. With so many negative stereotypes associated with accents, no wonder so many people want to camouflage them!
