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Accent Intolerance:
It's Sheer Nonsense
By
Rafael Martinez-Alequín
January
17, 2007
New York City has been from its very birth a city of immigrants,
when the
Dutch arrived and snatched this land from the real Native Americans,
whom
they called Indians due to Christopher Columbus’s error.
Today New York City’s status as a city of foreigners not only
remains
unchanged, but more than ever in its history it is home to New Yorkers
the
range of whose roots spans practically every region of this planet.
Over
150 languages are spoken here. It’s my opinion that if serious
research is
done, this number will total over 200, if we take into account those
languages that due to reasons of political imperialism are classified
as dialects.
Almost half of today’s New Yorkers come from other countries,
and since the
1980s immigrants from many ethnicities have brought back life to
communities
of this city that during the 60s and 70s had become boring, sleepy
villages
where commercial and cultural life had slowed down almost to a standstill.
Such a community is Flushing, in the borough of Queens, which has
been
brought back to life by immigrants of various ethnicities, most
of them from
Asia. I could just as well have chosen other New York neighborhoods
as
examples.
The probability that a New Yorker whose ancestors settled here one
hundred
years ago or more--Italians, Jews, Irish, Polish, among others--will
find
someone who speaks English as a second or third language is huge.
Arguably,
four out of every ten people, if not more, when one takes into account
the
undocumented, speak a language that is not English. With a new wave
of
immigration that goes back only twenty years, the possibility that
a person
speaking English will do so with a foreign accent is also huge.
Unfortunately,
there are still people with a backwoods mentality in this
great city to whom a foreign accent awakens all sorts of absurd
prejudices.
One of the most ingrained is that if someone pronounces English
with a
foreign accent, in the mind of the Neo-Troglodyte, this person
ipso facto
loses all of his or her intelligence and ingenuity. If this accent
is that of a Hispanic, as opposed to, for example, that of a Francophone,
this prejudice surfaces with shocking brutality. The one who reacts
to the person who has this type of an accent turns into a jerk right
before the very eyes of the victim and of other witnesses. Not a
few times I’ve seen this drama unfold in front of my eyes
and ears during the fifty years that I have lived in this nation
and in this city. I’ve had the fortune and the honor of being
the student of truly brilliant scholars of Hispanic culture because
despite the fact that I have live most of my life in this Big Apple,
I made it my business to develop my mother tongue, Spanish.
The respect
that I have felt toward my professors and mentors, whose
intellectual and academic prowess, in addition to their political
and moral
integrity, has earned them fame and acclaim, has bordered on idolatry;
I declare this unabashedly. Nevertheless, on various occasions I
have seen
these men and women in situations where they are not known, in which
as they
try to express themselves in an English that is correct albeit with
a strong
Spanish accent, they are ridiculed and belittled by English-speaking
people
who ingnorantly confuse content with form and treat them as if they
were
real morons incapable of having the knowledge and skills that they
indeed
have, which are quite superior to those of their persecutor, and
for which
they have repeatedly earned recognition and praise.
Whoever disparages
someone for speaking English with a foreign accent, risks
looking like a genuine imbecile, especially if the person whom he
or she
disparages is someone whose excellence has been acknowledged, be
it as a
journalist, lexicographer, novelist, philosopher or politician.
The people
whom I saw and heard being subjected to this stupid prejudice, were
and are,
precisely, well-known journalists, novelists, philosophers, politicians
and
even lexicographers who have collaborated in the creation of Engllish-Spanish:
Spanish-English dictionaries, and who evidently, despite their accent,
have a better knowledge of the English language than their persecutor.
Those of us who witnessed these incidents invariably agreed that
the one who was really ignorant and gross was the one making fun
of our learned scholar’s accent.
But, let me
add this: to disparage someone because he or she speaks with a
foreign accent, no matter what this person’s intellectual
level is, and to further do so in public, is a lack of good manners,
and when it’s a native New Yorker who makes himself look ridiculous
by trying to ridicule his fellow human being’s accent, it
just shows that this person doesn’t have a scintilla of civility.
This is an even bigger flaw if the one who disparages the person
works at an agency that is there to serve the constituents of this
city regardless of the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their
creed, their gender, their sexual orientation, or their accent.
It’s high
time that we denounce this lack of respect for what it is:
discrimination, besides the fact that it’s sheer, assinine
nonsense.
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