When I was young, I sometimes used to say “I don’t have an accent.” Now I realize that such a statement is tantamount to saying that “I haven’t observed/experienced/fully internalized the breadth and extent of language x.”

I somewhat internalized my gringo accent when learning to speak Spanish, but I think it was really took moving to New York City to learn the degree to which I will probably never speak Spanish like someone who grew up in Mexico or Cuba or Colombia. When I was first learning Hindi and went to India with my family, I became painfully aware of my Americanized Hindi especially when a security guard picked me out immediately as a foreigner to make me pay more for visiting a museum, as was the policy (I was relying on my mom to do all talking so that he wouldn’t even be suspicious enough to check 🤣. I hadn’t gotten my OCI yet.) But it really took leaving the US (or atleast the midwest) to understand the degree to which accent is used to identify an “in-group” and an “out-group.” But when an American says “I don’t have an accent,” I hear “I have never left my home town/state/region.” And most Americans have the financial means to do so at some point for some amount of time (not frequently and not with any regularity, but likely 10% of Americans simply do not have the means to never visit another side of the country). I hear “I have no interest in seeing the rest of the world on its own terms.” My excuse for saying ‘I don’t have an accent’ is that I was a child, but what is the excuse of grown people saying that?

When I went to college, I learned that it is a midwestern mannerism to say “pop” instead of “soda.” It also learned that other American dialects of English will pronounce a harder “t” in “water,” while the American midwesterner will say something more like wāder. Of course, linguists have somewhat extensively documented that t and d flapping as part of so-called General American English . But I am more concerned with the exclusivity that so-called “General American English” enjoys in the minds of most Americans, and of my past child self. What forces create that tribalism, arbitrary preference, and (in many cases) solipsism?

It is interesting that sometimes my mother will ask me whether she has an accent, but my father has never asked me that. They have both lived in the US for over 30 years. I sometimes say that my mom has a “white people voice” to crassly describe her flavor of code-switching . Clearly she has learned that she will get farther in her career by modulating her dialect/accent based on the present circumstances. I think that’s sad. Clearly a sizable percentage of her coworkers took her less seriously/limited her professional success until she learned that skill. I hope it was mainly her white coworkers and not other coworkers whose minds have been colonized into believing that even their own speech is inadequate for the purposes of career advancement in corporate America. On one hand, accents are shallow and maybe not so difficult to learn/emulate over time, but I wonder what else she could have learned if she didn’t feel the need to learn a separate accent that she only uses when she speaks with white people.

A cynic might argue that ‘creating something of a transcendental norm of the local accent is one of the many mechanisms though which we otherize the rest of the world and prime the American mind for imperialism’ (e.x. this silly skit about the BBC and Iraq ). Many of my teachers lived in different parts of the United States, so it is entirely plausible to have some informal discussion of the many ways in which English is spoken atleast within the US if not around the world, and that none of them are (more) “right” or “wrong.”

The preference of one accent (likely the one around which one grew up) is ridiculous under both a descriptivist and prescriptivist view of linguistics. From a descriptivist framing, as long as others can understand my speech, accent essentially amounts to the color of one’s shirt insofar as it is little more than a decoration. And if anything these days, “the Indian variant of British English” is probably close to the median English spoken throughout the world. And we don’t talk about tyrannical and infantile linguistic prescriptivism. We let them wither and die in their own pedantry.