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Ozaru

RP speaker in Japan, late 1980s.

There were many tales of discrimination of various types, both for and against ‘outsiders’ (with quite different attitudes towards whites, blacks and Asians), as detailed by Arudo Debito amongst others. Many were flattering, amusing, or mildly irritating, rather than distressing – for example, one Western friend (fluent in Japanese) who had a perfectly normal conversation with an eyes-down shopkeeper until the latter looked up and realized it was a ‘foreigner’… whereupon they suddenly lost the ability to understand any of the Japanese said gaijin was saying.

One experience of my own: I telephoned an estate agent. My Japanese was good, but evidently still had some kind of twang to it.

“Are you foreign? We don’t let to foreigners.”

I fibbed: “No, I’m just from [a remote area], maybe it’s our local accent?”

“Ah, that’s OK then”.

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Bryanna

I’m from Long Island NY, from a family with a pretty light accent to begin with, or so I thought. When I went away to college (the first one in my immediate family) to upstate NY the first thing that I knew had to go was my accent. Every time I said anything with my natural lilt my roommates were laughing and demanding I repeat certain words for their entertainment because it was just so funny. I was majoring in Linguistics and when we learned phonetics in the introduction class I used that understanding to change how I spoke. The making fun stopped and no one could tell where I was from anymore; I had to lose a piece of my identity to be accepted by my peers here and more broadly in academia as I’m now working on my PhD.

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Adam

Man who’s just been introduced to me in a pub: ‘You don’t SOUND Australian’.

His partner: ‘Well perhaps he’s got a posh Australian accent?’

Man: ‘Oxymoron, dear. Don’t be silly!’

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Sid

Just went to a shop and with my now weak Scottish accent spoke to the staff, he jerked his head up and looked at me with a frown trying to place it. nothing was said but the frown…

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Montserrat

Once my older brother took a taxi in Madrid. He often goes to the capital for business. During the trip he was called to his mobile phone. When he heard him talking, the taxi driver stopped and ordered him to get out of the cab. He had recognized that he was speaking Catalan.

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Katie

While working as a waitress in Spain I was once asked by a fellow Englishman if I had ferrets and lived on a farm because I was from the north.

Also while working at the same job another English customer told me ‘oh, you’re actually quite intelligent despite your stupid northern accent’.

While working as an English teacher in Spain, a student once asked me why I didn’t ‘autocorrect myself and at least try to speak in standard English’.

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Charles

I have experienced prejudice in English, Welsh, Gaelic, Polish, French, Spanish, and Italian. The one experience I want to share, though, was not in response to a minority, regional, or foreign linguistic variety – plenty of those – but in response to my near-RP accent. I would say I have a Welsh accent, but it’s very “mild”, so it’s not always detectable to people who don’t have RP accents. On a number of occasions, I have had Anglophobic comments, but I was once screamed at by a girl in Glasgow whilst I was on the phone. “F*** off back to England!”, she screamed as I spoke to a close friend walking past Kelvinhall station on my mobile phone. It was very intimidating and upsetting. I feel that there is a lot of aggression towards the RP accent in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Perhaps not unsurprising considering the complex history on these islands – but not really fair on individuals.

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Madeleine

Undergrad at York, during phonetics tutorials one awful guy kept asking me to repeat words in my hilarious Cheshire accent (nuts, cup, bus etc) – are you studying linguistics because you talk weird, did they close all the coal mines back home etc. More fool him it was actually SALT mines in my town not coal…ha!…now after PhD I have had comments at networking events about ‘doing very well for yourself considering…’

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Natsumi

‘I did not expect THAT!’ – Reaction over an American accent coming from an Asian girl.

‘How is your English so good?’ – Presumption that my native language can’t be English.

‘No, you ARE American’ – This guy started a fight over this, convinced he knew me better.

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Louise

It wasn’t until I got my Masters in Linguistics that I felt I could speak in my accent in professional settings. That qualification is the only ammunition I have when I’m faced with classist attitudes.