As an immigrant from Cameroon, West Africa, I have been questioned on several occasions about how I speak English fluently. Often I am faced with an immediate assumption that the English I speak is not “proper English” because of the subtle difference in pronunciation and accent.
But English is one of the primary languages of Cameroon as well as numerous African countries once colonized by the British. South Africa, Ghana, Botswana, Namibia, Liberia, Gambia, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Lesotho and the list goes on. According to the State Demographics Data from Migration Policy Institute, about 120,000 African born people live in New Jersey.
While people are becoming increasingly accepting of visible differences like race, there is silent discrimination that occurs when confronted by invisible differences like accents, especially if the speaker is from an ethnic minority background.
Goodie Okechukwu, a writer with expertise in accent bias and inclusion, states in her article “Accent Based discrimination, a not so new Paradigm” that “effective communication is the means by which our connection to others are deepened. Accents are likely to pose a barrier to effective communication when the listener lacks goodwill. Without this goodwill, the accented speaker’s degree of communicative competence is irrelevant.”
This is a situation that I and other students not only from Africa face on a daily basis.
Mercer student Kenneth Thomas Baidoo, who is from West Africa and majoring in Computer Information Systems, says sometimes when he speaks amongst his American friends who have the native accent, he finds himself curving his words to sound more native because when he speaks with his accent, they do not make an effort to listen.
Okechukwu points out that one’s accent is part of their identity. As an African in America, I am often referred to as “African American” based on the color of my skin. But that term is typically attached to a different population, and speaking immediately reveals something about my own social and cultural identity that clashes with expectations, whether consciously or unconsciously.
According to an article for the American Psychological Association by Rosina Lippi-Green, listeners who have prejudice against accents can not hear what a person has to say because “they consider accent as a litmus test for exclusion.”
The stereotypes around accents are not new but little attention is given to this. It is overlooked despite its importance in effective communication amongst students and faculty members.
Educational institutions can help reduce this stigma by creating more awareness on campus. A starting point is recognizing the existence of accent-based discrimination and creating awareness about it by incorporating it into the already existent anti-discrimination programs.
