You know what’s weird? If you have an accent, even quite a small one, people assume that you must have a limited vocabulary. You have no idea how often I hear, “Oh, you know the word “efficient”? Wow!”
Even when people know that I have a PhD from Yale with a dissertation I wrote in English and that I have published an award-winning book of literary criticism in English, they still can’t help looking stunned when I say “rambunctious” or “outlandish”
I know somebody with a PhD in linguistics from a top-ranking school, and even this scholar can’t help expressing surprise when I use 3 – syllable words. And that’s after 8 years of knowing me.
It’s especially annoying when folks with those ugly South Carolinian or Bostonian accents assume that I must be an illiterate because of my accent.
Things are even worse for the native speakers of English from India or Africa. People tend to praise their “good English” in tones usually reserved for bright 5-year-olds. A colleague from India says people tend to raise their voices and enunciate VE-RY CLE-AR-LY whenever they hear her pronunciation. And telling them that she’s a native speaker of English doesn’t help.
By the way, this never happens when one speaks Spanish to Spanish-speakers. Unless your language skills are very limited, nobody treats you like an idiot because your pronunciation differs.
The cost of being admitted to a language community is vastly different for speakers of English and Spanish.
Clarissa's Blog 
Interesting. Which communities of Spanish speakers did you end up speaking with in depth? I can see Mexican immigrants not being snotty about bad Spanish, but I’m not sure that applies to Spanish speakers in Spain for example.
Is this something you notice among Americans or just across primarily Anglophone countries (like Britain)?
I haven’t noticed that Quebecois or French people want to talk to you in French but I’ve had some nice conversations with Africans from Francophone nations.
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Confounding factors: (1) prejudice against foreigners (very common in the south and in the Indiana-Southern Illinois and Missouri region and places like South Boston); (2) use of words that have virtually dropped out of usage (e.g., rambunctious). There’s a long tradition of the first in US history. People who get here want to close the doors so no on else can. That prejudice underlays a lot of the current nonsense about illegals.
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That prejudice underlays a lot of the current nonsense about illegals.
This is an interesting observation. However, you mean ‘underlies’ I hope.
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Tell ’em you’ll “regale” them with your “sesquipedalian anecdotes” and see what happens … 🙂
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There are many variations of this phenomenon. My mother was really irritated when people who met her assumed she was hard of hearing just because she was over 90 years old. She said they talked so loudly it hurt her ears, sometimes.
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It’s true that people yell at the elderly a lot for this reason.
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(CN: A bunch of stuff Clarissa and many readers already know, but which some might not)
English has the lowest barrier to entry of any major language in the world. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to put a few words together and start speaking. And the first few semesters are very easy and most motivated students make rapid initial progress.
On the other hand, it has a very high barrier to mastery. In general with a foreign language the easier the first year is the harder the fifth year will be (and vice versa). English starts easy and gets harder and more frustrating (Slavic languages start at excruciatingly difficult levels but get easier the longer you plug away at them).
Spanish is somewhere in the middle, easy but not too easy at the beginning, harder but not too hard later on. And the overall pronunciation of just about any type of Spanish is far easier to acquire than very weird (by world standards) English pronunciations.
And there’s the effect where people think you’re hearing the same thing they are. That is if they have the slightest problem understanding your pronunciation they’ll assume you have problems understanding them (kind of like people yelling so they can hear themselves over earphones – they forget the other person can’t hear the music).
And sadly, IME Russophone accents can be really tough for many English speakers. I heard an interview with a Russian speaker (not you) whose English writing is also at your basically native level and was grasping at trying to understand what he was saying. Indian Englishes (it’s not unified at all AFAIK) can also be very tough for Americans, even ones who are used to hearing accents. I once knew a Tamil speaking couple and had to listen to them really closely to figure out which language they were speaking with each other.
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Great observations!
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One of my favorite stories is sort of the opposite. A store clerk asked if I needed any help, and I said, in perfectly normal American English and no accent (since I was a local), “No, someone else went to the back to fetch me an office chair.” They then asked if I was British because I used the word fetch. Really now!? It’s only two more letters than “get” and is not that obscure. People are weird…
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Hilarious. 🙂 People are often completely confused by the slightest deviation from what they perceive as a linguistic norm.
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My english is pretty american but I tend to say ‘queue’ more often than ‘line’ which causes a bit of a confusion.
‘Q what?’
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“Where’s the taxi rank?”
“The what?”
“Taxi rank, it’s where you find taxis …”
“OH so that’s what you call it in your country!”
“What do you call it in yours?”
“Uh … well … we don’t have a name for it really …”
Thankfully I didn’t also mention a “set down point” … 🙂
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I had no idea it’s called a taxi rank. It’s good to have a name for it.
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I’ve never heard ‘taxi rank’ before, I know that as a ‘taxi stand’.
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I was going to say the same thing, but now that I think of it I don’t think I know it from actual usage in the US (I’ve never lived in a place with enough taxis to justify knowing it). I probably picked it up in a textbook for another language as an English translation….
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“You don’t sound like you’re from here … where are you from?”
“Lots of places.”
“No, really, where are you from?”
“Do you have five minutes?”
“Why?”
“Because the list is going to take that long.”
“LOTS OF PLACES … Got it.”
🙂
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I feel infantilized as a TV viewer when TV broadcasters find it somehow necessary to put subtitles under any newsmaker or interviewee whose English is at all accented.
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I don’t. There are lots of native accents that I find hard to hack through to get to the meaning (in the UK esp Northern Irelanand and some Northern English and Scottish accents).
And people without experience with accents (esp in real life) are often genuinely thrown by them. Why not help them out some?
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Speech Accent Archive Over 2000 voice samples compared to generalized american accent (GAE) from all over the world.
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