Accents are something that can’t be eliminated and many people have different ideas about accents even though people of the same race who live in the same area may also resent people who speak with accents.

 

Since the united states of America is an immigrated country, there are millions of people come to USA every single year. And most of them are English Second Language.  Based on the different cultural from their mother country they must have different accent while they are speaking English. I found something interesting on wiki which states that “in sociolinguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation. An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their first language (a foreign accent).” （wiki,2018）According to the wiki, we can see that accents are influenced by different RACES and cultures.

 

Accents typically differ in quality of the voice, pronunciation and distinction of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word “accent” may refer specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word ‘dialect’ encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. Often ‘accent’ is a subset of ‘dialect’. And in my personal opinion that accent is everywhere, and everyone should everyone should accept it instead of discrimination. I say this because I have an accent and I hope that people with an accent don’t feel inferior.

 

I mentioned in the beginning of the article that the United States is a country of immigration, so there are many people whose native language is not English, so they speak English with a certain accent. “Mother Tongue” is a personal essay by the American novelist Amy Tan. For Tan, this variety of “Englishes” is particularly resonant for children of immigrant families, who are shaped in interesting ways by the way they experience the language that their parents have had to learn as adults. Tan realized that the version of English she uses with her mother and close family is a kind of shorthand “broken” English that replicates some of the idiosyncrasies of a native speaker of Chinese who had learned English as an adult rather than as a child. Tan hears her mother’s speech as fluid and natural – because she has grown up hearing her mother’s version of English all her life, she understands it completely and without effort. Tan also give us two examples of people discriminate her mother’s accent. First one is after calling her mom’s stockbroker to complain about a delay, Tan later saw him when her mom went to see him in person – and noticed his surprise that Mrs. Tan was suddenly yelling at him with a heavy accent. In text from paragraph 10 to paragraph 12 where says “And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, ‘Why he don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money. And then I said in perfect English, ‘Yes, I’m getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.’ Then she began to talk more loudly. ‘What he wants, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?’ And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, ‘I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in New York next week.’ And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.” Another one is after being diagnosed with a benign brain tumor, Tan’s mom called the hospital to get copies of her CAT scan in order to understand her exact diagnosis. Despite her pleas that her husband and son had died of brain tumors and that she was extremely worried, the hospital refused to apologize for misplacing her test results. But when Tan calls, speaking without an accent, the hospital representative is deeply apologetic and promises to correct the error.  In text paragraph 13 where states “We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So, she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn’t budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English — lo and behold — we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.” Both cases point to discrimination by native speakers against people with accents. Later, the author found that the wonder of language was that there was no standard answer, and there was no fixed answer like mathematics, physics and chemistry. Therefore, the author abandoned medicine and tried to change people’s opinions through his own efforts. Although it was not so smooth at the beginning and the publishing house was not so optimistic about her, the author persisted. The essay ends with the line, “I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: ‘So easy to read’” which marks the author’s success.

I’m also a mandarin speaker who is an English second language speaker. I totally understand why the author writing the article for. When I first came to the United States, I was often looked down upon for my poor English and strange accent. However, I think this is the result of different cultures and should not be discriminated against.

 

On other hand, the article named African – American English: From the Hood to the Amen Corner written by Geneva Smitherman. At the beginning of the article, the author describes his life in Tennessee as a child. It was all so agreeable that no one had any criticism of the way the author spoke with his accent. As we can find in the first paragraph fourth and fifth sentences “Those years I was basically monolingual, speaking the African American English of my traditional black church and of my family and also of Ms. Erline. I didn’t have any problems in terms of language until we moved to Chicago and Detroit.” But everything changed when the family moved from Tennessee to Chicago, and a European American teacher doesn’t like the author’s dialect in other words because the author has an accent, so the teacher doesn’t like the student. The teacher even asked the author to attend language classes and speech to help eliminate accents. It turns out that students with a little accent are sent to these classes even though they are not second language students or even native speakers. As I said at the beginning of the article, the United States is a nation of immigrants. People from all over the world come from different cultures. African English is also an intangible culture. Besides, there is no standard English in the world. Every region has its own dialect. Therefore, we should not discriminate and criticize people who speak with an accent. This is what the author wants to express through the article. And I agree with the author’s point of view.

 

When I searched the Internet for accents and found an interesting answer everyone has an accent, and it’s a sign of provincialism to believe that you don’t have one.

 

Some people in Britain believe that they don’t have an accent because they think that their accent is simply a standard from which other accents depart, but it’s easy to point out regional features or historical development in any accent, if you are familiar with them.

 

For example: Received Pronunciation, which is the accent that its own speakers tend to associate with accent-less-ness, has its own phonological features just like any other accent. It changes over time, as you can tell from listening to historical recordings of BBC announcers: the ‘a’ in ‘land’ used to be pronounced more like ‘æ’, so ‘land’ sounded like ‘lend’. This would now sound posh to most English people, so RP has obligingly flattened its vowels so as to sound less class-based.

 

It also changes by region: people in the north of England don’t make a distinction between the sound of ‘put’ and ‘putt’, but RP speakers in the south do.

 

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180307-what-does-your-accent-say-about-you  as you can see there is a report about accent from BBC and which its states are about there is no standard English in the world. Accents can only be reduced with age and cannot be completely lost.

 

 

 

It is not hard to see the world through the picture is a diversified world with different cultures so we should not discriminate against people with accent more because we can tell which country they are from by the accent more can get to the country’s cultural customs, we should learn from each other, rather than discrimination or contempt.