All of it started, as this stuff usually do, with an Instagram advert. “Nobody tells you this if you happen to’re an immigrant, however accent discrimination is an actual factor,” stated a lady within the video. Her personal accent is faintly Japanese European—so delicate it took me a couple of playbacks to note.
The advert was for BoldVoice, an AI-powered “accent coaching” app. A couple of clicks led me to its “Accent Oracle,” which promised to guess my native language. After I learn a prolonged phrase, the algorithm declared: “Your accent is Korean, my buddy.” Smug. However spectacular. I’m, in actual fact, Korean.
I’ve lived within the US for greater than a decade, and my English isn’t simply fluent. You possibly can say it’s hyperfluent—my diction, for one, might be two normal deviations above the nationwide common. However that also doesn’t imply “native.” I discovered English simply late sufficient to overlook the crucial window for buying a local accent. It’s a distinction that, relying on the period, might result in sure issues. Within the Guide of Judges, the Gileadites are stated to have used the phrase “shibboleth” to determine and slaughter fleeing Ephraimites, who couldn’t pronounce the sh sound and stated “sibboleth” as an alternative. In 1937, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the loss of life of any Haitian who couldn’t pronounce the Spanish phrase perejil (parsley) in what grew to become referred to as the Parsley Bloodbath.
So the stakes felt excessive because the Accent Oracle saved listening to me speak, at one level scoring me 89 p.c (“Frivolously Accented”), one other time 92 p.c (“Native or Close to-native”). The unfold was unsettling. On a foul day, I might have been slaughtered. To enhance my odds of survival, I signed up for a free, one-week trial.
There’s a medium-is-the-message high quality to accents. How you say one thing usually reveals extra—about your origin, class, schooling, pursuits—than what you say. In most societies, phonetic mastery turns into a type of social capital.
Because it has for all the pieces else, AI has now come for the accent. Corporations like Krisp and Sanas promote real-time accent “neutralization” for name heart staff, smoothing a Filipino agent’s voice into one thing extra palatable for a buyer in Ohio. The fast response from the anti-AI camp is that that is “digital whitewashing,” a capitulation to an imperial, monolithic English. That is usually framed as a racial situation, maybe as a result of adverts for these providers characteristic folks of coloration and the decision facilities are in locations like India and the Philippines.
However that’d be too hasty. Modulating speech for social benefit is an outdated story. Do not forget that George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion—and its musical adaptation, My Truthful Woman—hinges on Henry Higgins reshaping Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney accent. Even the eminent German thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte shed his Saxon accent when he moved to Jena, fearing folks wouldn’t take him critically if he sounded rural.
That is no relic of the previous. A 2022 British research discovered {that a} “hierarchy of accent status” persists and has modified little since 1969, with 1 / 4 of working adults reporting some type of accent discrimination on the job, and practically half of respondents saying they had been mocked or singled out in social contexts.
In a Hacker Information thread asserting BoldVoice’s launch, one commenter wrote, “I’d fairly attempt towards a world the place accents matter lower than fixing accents.” Effectively, inform that to numerous Koreans on this nation navigating the treacherous phonetic gulf between seashore and bitch or coke and cock. That on-line remark was attribute of the standard sanctimonious pablum, the sort of informal ethical excessive floor afforded solely to a local English speaker or to somebody willfully unaware of the each day indignities non-native audio system face.
