Angela+Z’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

Our speech patterns, dialect, and accent define us. They can reveal our birthplace, our socioeconomic status, ethnicity or first language. Due to the vulnerability our accent can put us in, its very easy to be discriminatory against specific accents when really you mean to be towards those who have them. Immediately that comes to mind of course is the accent I come home to and cooed me to sleep as a baby, is my mother’s Spanish accent. Due to it, she knows that that alone outs her to other people as a foreigner. Even in situations like collecting rent from native English speakers, they will use her way of talking as a means to belittle her, asking for her to bring an interpreter so they can finally understand her when she’s been speaking English longer than I have been alive. Accents are easy gateways for people to be able to discredit anyone that you want and it's pathetic. A person will speak English with a German accent and what is said to him? Nazi. A person will speak with an Indian accent and what are they? Either a convenience store owner or a terrorist. Either that or they’ll trivialize the person’s struggles by trying to “imitate” the person’s speech. Thanks to South Park and the likes, teenage boys are obsessed with trying to be as racist as possible under the guise of impersonating a Chinese accent. People are so quick to treat someone just speaking as something to ridicule.

And what I’ve been speaking about so far are accents of those learning second languages. Those who’ve probably learned more languages than the average native English speakers. They usually have to learn English as a necessity to survive in this country and their pronunciation is mocked. Those who learn a foreign language and never acquire a native accent usually learn the language later in adulthood, when it's nearly impossible be fully fluent. This is why I have no sympathy for someone in a Spanish class to have their non-native accent pointed out especially when they don’t practice on their own at all, as they learned the language relatively young and didn’t have to learn it to be considered a human being. It’s just a school requirement.

To the accents that aren’t due to learning English as a second language, it’s a little different. Certain cases of making fun of a dialect in a thinly veiled attempt to just make fun of the speaker do exist, in the case of AAVE (African American Vernacular English). People will always try to discredit that way of speaking as illogical or not intelligent simply because black people speak it. The use of double negatives (called a negative concord) is criticized as absurd, like used the sentence “Ain’t nobody called” since in Standard English the phrase would be “Nobody telephoned” instead. But the idea that different dialects or languages have different grammar rules is never mentioned. Italian, for example follows a similar way of AAVE where the phrase “Non ha telefonato nessuno” would be used in a similar instance which directly means “Not has telephoned no one”. The double negatives are apart of the language, as they are apart of AAVE. It is examples like these that showcase the acts that people of color cannot say or do without being seen as uneducated but a white person could do while still being seen as intelligent.

Moving on though, is to one less intense accent that is still often ridiculed. The vocal fries, excessive use of like and ending of a sentence that always sounds like a question, is the Moon-Unit inspired valley girl accent! Here the speaker of the valley girl accent will be portrayed as dumb, because that's usually what adults see the girls whose intonation is made up of these glorious characteristics, vapid shopaholics who are just totally clueless! I won’t argue so much about those who possess the shopaholic characteristic as the original demographic in question that had this accent were upper-middle class white girls who live in Beverly Hills. And not to say they are all dumb as that would defeat the entire point of my speech, but Alicia Sliverstone at the end of Clueless kissing her step-brother wasn’t that smart. However, nowadays it doesn’t take much in Southern California to develop a valley girl accent so those with the 1980s mindset that only Julie Brown white upper-middle class type characters use them are incorrect. Unfortunately it’s a target aimed at women that men really have no equivalent of. The closest you can make fun of guys’ language is for their constant reassurance of their heterosexuality but that's still not on the same level.

So for the America I would want to live in, when we apply the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into our lives about not discriminating against national origin, we include accents into that. So cases like Clifford vs Commonwealth in which a police officer can identify a man as a participant in a crime without seeing him, simply because he “sounded black” are no longer tolerated. Or cases where someone with a foreign accent is rejected at every job interview because their accent is said to lead to poor communication or performance without any objective proof, are nonexistent. I want to die knowing that someone like my mother wouldn’t be ridiculed simply because of the way they talk and that all their hard work in learning English would be appreciated. There can be funny instances where the word ego and the waffle brand Eggo are interchanged but there is no excuse to just completely deride someone for the way they speak.

sources:

Pullum, Geoffrey K. "African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with mistakes." Editorial. Workings of Language 1999: n. pag. Stanford. Web. 5 June 2017.