What’s in an Accent? On Speech, Privilege, and Belonging

Words & Illustration by: Mahati Santhanakrishnan

“BY IMPOSING ITSELF AS THE NORM, STANDARDIZED AMERICAN ENGLISH HAS MADE ITSELF INVISIBLE”

My accent is what people call the “international school accent.” It’s something ambiguously North American and British, although it’s gotten more American after coming to New York. The accent comes from growing up in an English medium school with other third culture kids and a foreign curriculum. I grew up in Cebu, Philippines. My parents used to live in Bangalore, India, and when my dad got a job offer from a foreign company we all moved to Cebu for what was supposed to be just a few years. Thinking I would soon be returning to the Indian school system, my parents put me in an international school in order to simplify the transition for when we moved back. We ended up living in the Philippines for 15 years. 

The thing about international schools is that they want their students to be “global citizens”: and by that, they mean for these kids to be equipped with all the tools necessary to assimilate as easily as they can into whatever society and culture we find ourselves. This is why, despite international schools existing in so many different countries and having such a diverse student body, we all, ultimately, sound the same. The English we are taught is meant to seamlessly integrate into as many communities as possible, which is why the international school accent is a “default”, one that bears no markers of a specific culture or region. It’s an accent that’s plain, a little boring, even. 

My family moved back to India just after I finished tenth grade. Feeling a little foreign in a country I’m supposed to be from wasn’t a very new experience. Frequent visits to my family afforded me fluency in my mother tongue. I spoke Tamil well enough that while I could never be mistaken for a true local, I would definitely be considered a Tamil person. I didn’t just look Indian: I could speak like one, too. My English, however, immediately marked me as one of those kids that grew up abroad and doesn't seem very Indian at all. Everyone knows what kind of kids go to international school: children whose families have the means to put them in these kinds of private schools in the first place. This accent is a marker (and product of) a certain kind of monetary and class privilege. 

Sounding American in a non-western country is one thing: having a non-western accent in America is a different matter entirely. You aren’t just considered a little outlandish for sounding “ethnic” in the global north, you are automatically considered lesser. My roommate and I went to the same high school, but while I went to a very small IB-continuum school in the Philippines, she was born in Hyderabad, and then moved all over India throughout her childhood. My roommate sounds Indian, because she actually grew up around Indian people. Her English is much better than mine. She is much smarter than me: She chooses her words better, and is a much more confident speaker. She’s the one who will go up to customer service for me when I’m too shy to ask the cashier a question. Her accent is not so strong that it covers up the words she is saying, and yet plenty of people seemingly fail to understand her when she talks. In one such instance at the deli/grocery store the cashier, to our incredulity, completely blanked when my roommate asked her a question, turned to me and said: “Do you know what she’s saying?”  We both froze, and looked at each other. It took a second to respond. I had to recount what just happened, because I swore we were all speaking English. My roommate became wholly irrelevant as soon as the cashier couldn’t parse out what she said. Despite her accent not even being that strong, as soon as she was labeled a non-native English speaker, it was like she was no longer there. 

There is a hyper-visibility around accents that come from the Global South. You get tagged as someone who is not from here, and categorized within an oppressive and arbitrary caste system where what is closer to “Western” ideals is at the top. Indeed, at the summit of this hierarchy live English accents like the “International School” one. By imposing itself as the norm, standardized American English has made itself invisible: it is the only English accent that, as the status-quo, can Other different variations of English, while it alone enjoys the benefits of being “neutral” and “imperceptible”.

But we can’t speak a language and not have an accent. The international school accent isn’t a default, nor is it neutral, since there is no such thing as an absent or neutral accent. The “International School” accent is simply the Frankenstein of the most common accents of the western world, the ones that Western hegemonic culture have forced upon as the only acceptable way of speaking. In other words, accents and language are inextricable from each other, and perhaps even synonymous. Therefore, behind this perceived “neutrality” of American standardized English lies the violence of a system built on white supremacist ideology. No accent is outside of culture, and therefore History, and it is crucial that we interrogate which parts of history have allowed for some accents to be scrutinized, while others get to disappear into the background.