By Stefano Nunes
I would like to begin by stating the simple fact that there is no such thing as “not having an accent”. Every language has accents; if they are not regional, they are foreign, and none are better than the other. I understand the desire to “sound native”, which is sometimes referred to as “speaking properly”, but since we grimace at prescriptivists here, if you are being understood, you are speaking properly. Sometimes, if you are not being understood as well, I’m looking at you Scots.
Is there such a thing as manufacturing an accent? Is there such a thing as an inauthentic accent? Are we obligated to obtain our accents by accident? Are we somehow bound, by a duty to authenticity, to the accents we inherit at the time of our learning a language?
For natives, the question seems to be more or less determined by socioeconomic mobility. You may originally have a “lower class” accent, and then go upwards. This is the case in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion of course, but it is also the case for the most inauthentic accents in all the English language: received pronunciation (RP) and mid-Atlantic. RP is what is commonly known as BBC English, which is to say, when news anchors apply for their job, they have one accent, and then acquire a whole new accent, in order to speak “the queen’s English” on television; the same phenomenon occurred for actors in film in the mid-20th century in the USA, as well as the children of the upper class, whose accents were tweaked to sound more cultivated, which is to say, less continentally American, and more old-world British.
Oddly enough, it does not seem acceptable to go down the social ladder with your accent. It is deemed offensive and fake to adopt a regional accent associated to a lower class (African American Vernacular English or Cajun). The same phenomenon can be observed in other languages, where regional accents are acceptable only if you were allotted that accent due to some kind of geographic lottery, but it is acceptable, even encouraged, that if you move “up” in your life and career, that your accent should sound more like the way people speak in the capital, more specifically, in the upper echelons of society, even if that accent never really existed spontaneously.
Would it be a marker of cultural appropriation to simply “adopt” an accent purely for its aesthetic? I am very drawn to the many Afro Caribbean accents around London, but if I attempted to adopt one, would I be caricaturing it? Would I be converting the accent into a meme of itself in the same way that non-POC actors voicing POC cartoons with accents (Apu from the Simpsons for example) is increasingly seen as reproachable?
I learned English as my 4th language, when I moved to the UK at age 7; before moving there, as a joke, my American uncle made me promise not to get a British accent, and at 7 years old, I took it extremely seriously, and dedicated myself not only to learning English properly, but to do it with an American accent.
Fortunately, TV shows imported from the US were on heavy rotation, so I had good references. Somehow, nobody ever questioned the fact that I had an American accent, maybe being Brazilian made it somehow expected. Funnily enough, my sister started off with an accent similar to mine, but now speaks something close to received pronunciation. Could I say her accent was manufactured? She did decide to cultivate it after she already learned English. But why should she be bound to any accent? She is foreign, English is her 4th language, why shouldn’t she be free to have a Punjabi accent?
Furthermore, do we even have a choice in this? To what extent do we even have any power over our accents? Certain sonorities are indeed so foreign that new learners of a language are simply unable to conceive and reproduce them. But some sonorities are very similar in non-native accents. Wouldn’t it be much easier for Latinxs to learn English with a West African accent, as the /r/ is rolled? If there really is no choice, then there is absolutely no reason to reprimand someone for having any sort of accent. Whether it is something we are privileged enough to choose, or if we are allocated one, we should stop policing ourselves trying to sound perfectly native, because these accents don’t even exist.
Are we only “allowed” to either have an accepted “standard” form of native, or an accent reminiscent of our mother tongues? If you can’t speak like a native, why shouldn’t you speak like anyone else, especially other peoples whose own languages have been supplanted by European languages?
If there are really no “standard” accents, except for some sort of class-related invention, then there are no limits. Go ahead, learn French with the sunnier-sounding southern accent, learn German with the very hearty mouth-full-of-beer-and-bread sounding Bavarian twang, learn Portuguese with the sing-song rhythms of the North-East.
Prescriptivism is dead, let’s bury it y’all.