Accent discrimination happens at work. How do we listen better?

Episode transcript

Dominic Amegashitsi: If you are an immigrant or someone with an accent, that’s always a kind of a vulnerable portion of you.  

Jingnan Peng: This is Dominic Amegashitsi. 

Amegashitsi: I am originally from Ghana, West Africa. 

Peng: And he settled in Minnesota in 2003. 

Jessica Mendoza: Dominic got a communications degree from a university in St. Paul. Started a career in leadership training. And these days, he lives in Wisconsin. 

Amegashitsi: I work for CVTC, which is Chippewa Valley Technical College, and I work as a leadership and organizational developer.

Peng: But throughout Dominic’s time in the States, there’s one thing he’s always been aware of: his accent.  

Amegashitsi: People were like, “Oh, we can’t understand what you are trying to say.” So I became aware that for me to be heard, you know, I need to really work on this.

Mendoza: Sometimes it was just a little snag – something he knew people might comment on. Or they’d ask him to repeat himself more than once.

Peng: But other times, it became a real issue. Like, once –

Amegashitsi: This story was like four or five years ago.

Peng: – Dominic was interviewing for a job as a training manager. 

Amegashitsi: I was going in as someone with a training background. I’ve already played that role a little bit with another organization, I’ve already gotten a masters degree in training and development. 

[LIGHT MUSIC]

The HR manager called me the next day to share with me that I had really good qualifications and experience that they would have loved to have. But it was because of my accent that they were worried. People I would be training may not be able to understand me. Or may not be able to be comfortable . . . 

Mendoza: In short, Dominic did not get the job. 

[THEME MUSIC]

Mendoza: Hello and welcome to “Say That Again?,” a podcast about how we sound, how we listen, and why that matters, from The Christian Science Monitor. I’m Jessica Mendoza. 

Peng: And I’m Jingnan Peng.

[THEME MUSIC]

Mendoza: Today on the show, we’re looking at what are probably familiar experiences: What it’s like to have trouble understanding someone, and what it’s like to not be understood. Especially at work. 

Peng: Because we may not realize it, but a lot of the time, these types of interactions happen in a work setting. Or at least, in someone’s work setting. 

Mendoza: Right. Like when an Uber driver talks to a customer, or a college professor is giving a lecture. And the people they’re talking to just don’t understand them. Whether you’re the speaker or the listener, that kind of exchange can be frustrating. 

Peng: And so, our question: What happens when the way you speak gets in the way of work? 

Mendoza: We follow Dominic’s journey to being more confident in the way he communicates. We meet his accent coach, who believes that communicating effectively is about a lot more than accent. 

Peng: We’ll also talk about unconscious bias, what the law says about accents in the workplace, and who gets to decide whether you’re understandable – or not. 

Mendoza: This is Episode 3: “Whose Job Is It Anyway?” 

[MUSIC]

Peng: So something you all should know about Dominic: He’s been speaking English basically his whole life.

Amegashitsi: If you know the history of Ghana, it was colonized by the British.

Peng: And so English is actually the country’s official language. 

Mendoza: Of course, Ghana has dozens of languages, including Dominic’s native Ewe. So English isn’t always used in everyday interactions. But –

Amegashitsi: – it was taught at school, and my education was in English.

Peng: So when Dominic came to the States, he wasn’t worried about having to learn a new language. He quickly realized, though, that just because he could speak English did not mean he would be understood.

Amegashitsi: I became very aware of it during my college years based on some of the feedback I’ve gotten. It became clearer that if I’m going to have a successful career it may be something I may need to polish up a little bit. 

[BRIEF PAUSE] 

Mendoza: This might be relatable to a lot of people. In 2018, 22% of US residents spoke a language other than English at home. That’s more than 67 million people. 

Peng: We tried to get numbers on people with foreign and regional accents, but that’s actually surprisingly complicated. Because – and we’ll talk about this more later – so much of how people speak is based on perception. And that’s hard to track.

Mendoza: Right. So we’re using speaking a foreign language at home as a sort of stand-in for how likely it is that someone has a non-American accent. (Remember, everyone has an accent. I even read somewhere that speaking without an accent is like writing without a font.) 

Peng: I love that. 

[MUSIC]

Peng: And so, that experience of not being understood might seem trivial. But it can also be really painful. 

Amegashitsi: I recall, this was way back, gosh, maybe 2003. I was with my sister-in-law in New York, and we went out shopping. And, you know, there was this lady who came and asked her a question.

Mendoza: Dominic’s sister-in-law gave an answer. The woman asked her to repeat herself. So she did. And they did this several times.

Amegashitsi: That lady said, “Can you repeat all that you said? Because I’m losing you. I don’t know what you’re saying.”  

Mendoza:  Finally –

Amegashitsi: My sister-in-law was like, “You know, I just want to go.” And I remember when she came into the car and her eyes welled with tears, and she looked to me and she said, “I am just tired. Feeling like I cannot be heard. Even with how many years I’ve been here, I have to repeat myself every time.”

[PAUSE] 

Peng: Dominic says the issue wasn’t that the lady asked his sister-in-law to repeat herself. It was how the woman said it. Like, it was almost accusatory. As if she was saying: “Why don’t you speak better?” 

Mendoza: Yeah. And I mean, I hate to have to admit this, but I’ve definitely been that person. Not so much in face-to-face interactions because I’m too conflict averse for that. But you know, all those times I saw someone on TV or listened to a podcast and was like, “Couldn’t they have found someone who speaks more clearly?” You know?

Peng: Yeah. Just a few weeks ago, actually, I was talking to a woman about the bus schedule. And I had to ask her to repeat herself a few times. And right after the interaction, I realized that I was feeling annoyed, even a little angry, you know, at how hard she was to understand. It was almost like this instinctive reaction. 

Mendoza: Yeah. And it’s interesting because you also told me that you yourself put a lot of work into learning English.

Peng: Right? Yeah, it’s – somehow I forgot how much effort I put into that. Like I’ve been taking classes since I was 2, you know, back in Beijing. And it’s a good reminder that whatever effort I make to understand someone within a short conversation might be nothing compared to all the efforts they’ve made to make themselves heard.

[MUSIC] 

Maria Ontiveros: If I have coworkers who have an accent, or I’m a customer and the person who answers the phone has an accent, I might breathe a heavy sigh and say, “Ugh, this is now a burden that I have to take on. And gosh, why is it on me to have to do that?”

Mendoza: Maria Ontiveros is a law professor at the University of San Francisco. She’s an expert on labor and employment law, including accent discrimination. 

Ontiveros: The counterbalancing feeling to that is: “You should figure out how to be able to speak more clearly.”

Mendoza: Yeah. 

Ontiveros: As opposed to, “I should become a better listener.”

Peng: That reaction has real consequences, especially for people at work. 

Ontiveros: The job that you are able to hold defines so much in terms of the respect that you’re held in society, the progress that you can make, that if somebody’s opportunities are foreclosed because of how they sound, it just ends up keeping huge portions of people from succeeding in society and their children from moving forward. 

[MUSIC] 

Mendoza: So remember Dominic’s story at the start of the episode? He’d applied for a training management position and didn’t get the job, pretty much because of his accent. 

Amegashitsi: Of course, just like any human being, of course, I wasn’t happy when I heard that, right? Because as a person with an accent going into any kind of interview, you are a little bit insecure with that, right? You know, you’re a little vulnerable.

Peng: We asked Dominic if he’d considered pointing out that he had worked in the industry before. And his previous employers didn’t have a problem with his accent.

Amegashitsi: No, I didn’t think of bringing it up. You know, I’m not very, you know, kind of argumentative or defensive. With all my resume and what I’ve actually done, if that is not enough, then maybe this is not the right place to be. 

Mendoza: This reaction is very Dominic – he’s a glass-half-full type of guy. But even if he had decided to stand up to the interviewer, it would have been a hard road, legally speaking.

Ontiveros: Accent cases are difficult for courts to figure out what to do with. 

Mendoza: Professor Ontiveros again.

Ontiveros: There is a federal law called Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII prohibits discrimination based on a number of different protected categories. 

Peng: Like race, sex, and religion. 

Ontiveros: One of those protected categories is national origin. So if an employer discriminates on the basis of accent, that is seen as a form of national origin discrimination.

Mendoza: For example –

Ontiveros: If the employer says something as boldly as, “You sound too Mexican to be a supervisor.” That equates to, “I’m not going to hire you, Maria, because of your national origin.”

Peng: So what protections then exist?

Ontiveros: So if an employee is not hired because of an accent, then they may have the opportunity to get that job. Or if they are fired because of an accent, then they have a right to be reinstated into that job and also to get some back pay. However –

Peng: – and, listen closely here –

Ontiveros: – an employer can justify that discrimination if they can show that it’s necessary to do that for the performance of the business.

Peng: I’ll say that again: if an employer can prove that a certain accent, quote, “interferes materially” with a person’s ability to do their job, that employer can justify discrimination. At least, in the courts. 

Ontiveros: And this comes up a lot, for instance, in academia, if you are going to be hiring a professor. A large portion of our job is to speak and to teach. So when you have communication as a key component of the job, then it makes sense to say that your way of speaking can materially interfere with the job. 

Mendoza: Think about jobs where the stakes are really high when the speaker is misunderstood. Like 911 operator, or air traffic controller. In those cases, it’s pretty reasonable to expect the employee to be someone who can be easily understood by their employers, their coworkers, or people in their community.

Peng: Right. But a lot of the time, we are not great judges of whether someone speaks clearly or not. 

Ontiveros: People don’t understand how much unconscious bias occurs with regard to accents. 

Mendoza: And this is where it gets tricky. 

Katherine Kinzler: When you think about accents, people can have this sense of an objective notion of their own comprehension. Like, “I know what I knowr. I heard you talk and I know that you have a heavy accent or a mild accent or whatever I infer.”

Peng: Katherine Kinzler is a psychology professor at the University of Chicago and special adviser to this project. You’ll recognize her if you’ve listened to Episode 2. 

Kinzler: But actually you could have two different people listen to the same voice and one person can feel that they heard a heavy accent and somebody else could feel that they didn’t. 

Mendoza: Because when I say someone has a heavy accent, that really just means I think that person has a heavy accent. But someone else might hear something totally different. 

[MUSIC]

Mendoza: There are all sorts of things that go into this. One of them, like we said, is unconscious bias. So bear with us here, we’re going to get a little nerdy and look at a couple studies around this. OK, Study Number One. This one was done by the sociolinguist Donald Rubin in 1992. 

Peng: What his team did was, they recorded samples of a native English speaker, someone born and raised in central Ohio. The script was based on a couple of New York Times articles. And they played it to a bunch of college students. 

Kinzler: They paired the voice with either a white-looking face, or an Asian-looking face. The undergraduate listeners felt that the voice, which again was somebody who had grown up in Ohio, sounded more foreign when the voice was paired with an Asian looking photo. And so it’s almost as if people could just invent the presence of an alleged foreign accent altogether.

Mendoza: Isn’t that wild? 

Peng: Yeah, I mean, it was the same voice. And so for Study Number Two – this one’s also really interesting. It’s by the linguist Stephanie Lindemann. Published in 2002. She brought in two groups of people. One group had shown bias against Korean Americans. The other group had not. 

Kinzler: And then all the participants interacted with a native speaker of Korean who was speaking in English.

Mendoza: Each group had to play a game with this person, and it involved asking a lot of questions. And the study found that – 

Kinzler: For the participants who came in biased against Korean-Americans, the communication kind of unraveled. They weren’t able to complete the task as well. They didn’t ask follow up questions, and as a result, the speaker’s communication was less good too.

[MUSIC] 

So much of listening is up to the listener, how much they show up and try to listen.

Peng: When you hear that, Jess, it feels like common sense.

Mendoza: I know.

Peng: But somehow when we’re talking to someone with a different accent, we just assume that we as listeners don’t need to actively participate anymore. 

Mendoza: Right? I mean, it’s so true. But, I don’t know, at the same time, I can still imagine people thinking: “I do want to understand the person I’m talking to. But I don’t.” You know? 

Peng: Mm, right.

Mendoza: So what does it mean to actively listen? And how does that make a real difference?

Peng: Well… I have all the answers for you. Because we found someone whose job it is to help people communicate better. And we’ll hear from her after the break. 

[MUSIC]

Clay Collins: Just a quick hello at this break; I’m Clay Collins, an editor here at the Monitor. I hope you’re enjoying this episode of “Say That Again?”. Have you ever had a workplace experience in which your accent either was or may have been a factor? Or have you successfully navigated what could have become an issue? We’d love to hear about it! Drop us a note – an anecdote, or just a comment – at podcast@csmonitor.com. And if you did like this episode, please share it with someone else who would too. Thanks.

[MUSIC]

Mendoza: Hey everyone, this is “Say That Again?” I’m Jess. 

Peng: And I’m Jing.

Mendoza: So before the break we were talking about how communication goes both ways. It’s the speaker’s job to try to make themselves clear and the listener’s job to try to understand.

Peng: But what does it mean to actually do these things? Especially when the listener isn’t familiar with the speaker’s accent?

[MUSIC] 

Mendoza: This brings us back to Dominic. 

Amegashitsi: I wanted to go into training and development, right? For people who go into those types of roles, they have to be well-spoken and able to express themselves very well. . . 

Peng: That was on Dominic’s mind when he graduated in 2008. So when he ran into Marlene Schoenberg at a conference that year, it seemed almost like fate. 

Marlene Schoenberg: It was the Forum for Workplace Inclusion in Minneapolis. And actually, we were going up an escalator.

Amegashitsi: We started talking. She noticed my accent, of course – 

Schoenberg: – and when I told him I was an accent coach, he said, “When can we get started? I would really like to make use of your services.”

Peng: Marlene is the president of Accent Wisdom. It’s a company that trains people to communicate better in the workplace.

Schoenberg: I have been working as an accent expert for over 30 years. I’m a certified speech pathologist and I’m also a certified ESL teacher.

Mendoza: Marlene is very clear. Her work is not about “getting rid” of accents. Instead, she says –

Schoenberg: My goal is for people to have more self-awareness, because there needs to be accent wisdom for speakers as well as for listeners. 

The best situation is if a company hires me to work with some of their international employees, if I can also work with the team or the managers to teach them how to better listen to a different accent. It’s a win-win for everyone. 

[LIGHT MUSIC]

Peng: With Dominic, the first step was to figure out what he both wanted and needed to work on.

Amegashitsi: I had like a list of words that whenever I say them, people are asking me, “What did you say?”

Mendoza: For example, words with an “R” sound. 

Amegashitsi: Like “arr”, right? “Rrr.” You almost have to use your lips and the top of your mouth in a way that I wasn’t used to in my own dialect or language.

Mendoza: And it gets even more complicated when that “R” sound is combined with another consonant. 

Schoenberg: Take the word “earl.” There used to be a song, “The Duke of Earl.”  

[“THE DUKE OF EARL” BY GENE CHANDLER, FROM THE INTERNET ARCHIVE]

Schoenberg: Somebody who has had a British education, and whose native language might be Ewe, like Dominic’s, might say, “the Duke of Ahh,” instead of “the Duke of Earl.” Because in British English the “R’s” are not strong. And then the “R-L” combination, in his home language, that’s just not there. 

[MUSIC] 

Peng: So what we usually perceive as a foreign accent is really just the sounds of a person’s native language being layered on top of a different language.

Schoenberg: When people speak fast, they move into the melody and intonation and articulation patterns of their native language. That’s when there’s more difficulty for the listener. So I teach them the patterns of sound substitutions or sound omissions to keep their ear out for. And once they’re more familiar with it, they can understand more.

Mendoza: We wanted to talk to Dominic about this more, but he didn’t have time. He did say we could talk about his sound patterns to help folks understand accents better.

Peng: Right. For me, when we were interviewing Dominic, I noticed that he sometimes pronounces the “X” sound, “ks”, as “s” sounds. So words like “expose” or “accent.” 

Amegashitsi: When people are exposed to people with an accent, it’s easier for people to respect and value people with an accent. 

Mendoza: Right.

Peng: Once I picked up on that, it became easier for me to focus on what he was saying, instead of how he was saying it. 

Mendoza: It seems like it should be intuitive, this whole idea of listening for certain sounds in another person’s speech, but I don’t think it is.

Schoenberg: It’s not intuitive. It depends on people’s background. If people grew up with a lot of different accents, it’s easier for them to figure out a new accent. If they grew up where there are not, it’s more of a challenge. It depends also on if people are visual learners or auditory learners. If you’re musical. 

[MUSIC] 

Mendoza: So Jing, was there anything people had a hard time understanding when you first came to the States?

Peng: Yeah! My name actually. So back in China, I introduce myself as Peng Jingnan, my full name. 

Mendoza: Mm. And that’s your last name and then your first name. 

Peng: Yup.

Mendoza: Could you say that one more time?

Peng: Peng Jingnan. But here in the US I shorten and anglicize it to Jing. 

Mendoza: Right, Jing like jingle bells. 

Peng: Exactly, but, you know, like half the time, when I tell people my name is Jing, they’ll say, “Jake?”, or even “Jane?” And sometimes, I would repeat my name. They’ll say, “OK, nice to meet you, Jake.” 

Mendoza: Yeah, I’ve seen that happen, even when we introduce ourselves to guests sometimes. 

Peng: Yeah. And I’m thinking maybe it’s that they’re layering a name that they know, that they’re more familiar with, onto the sound that I gave them? 

Mendoza: Mm-hmm.

Peng: Or maybe, you know, they’re assuming that I have an accent, and that I’m mispronouncing a Western name. I don’t know. 

Mendoza: We should do a poll, find out what people are thinking, right? 

Peng: We should.

Mendoza: But I mean this is also why hopefully we can help people learn to listen a little better.

Peng: Mm. 

[MUSIC]

Mendoza: OK, so we’ve talked about what happens when the listener doesn’t engage, or doesn’t engage enough. Especially when they’re talking to someone with an unfamiliar accent. But that leads us to a couple other important questions: How much can the speaker really change their accent? And should they? 

Peng: Right. And if your accent doesn’t change, does that mean you’re not putting enough effort into learning English?

Mendoza: Turns out, it’s all kind of complicated. 

Kinzler: I find one of the most fascinating things about language, the way that it’s both really hard to change and also changes all the time. 

Peng: That’s Katherine Kinzler again. She’s the psychologist at the University of Chicago.

Kinzler: So like say, you moved from the U.S. to England. You’re going to start to, you know, sound a little different – now, is someone in the UK going to think that you’re not American? Probably not, right? But your American friends at home might notice something that kind of changed about your voice. 

Mendoza: So if this isn’t the first time people are listening, they’ll know I’m from the Philippines. And I’ve talked about how my English has changed a lot in the past few years. Right? Like I definitely sound more American, I use more American terms, I pronounce some things differently. And my friends in Manila would know. For sure.

Peng: Yeah. Like if I were hearing you for the first time, I would think you grew up here.

Kinzler: And even at the moment to moment, if you’re in a new social interaction with somebody and you like each other, your vowels are going to shift just slightly to kind of sound more like each other’s. 

Peng: Woah.

Kinzler: And that’s really subtle. You know, it would take like a linguist to really go in and figure that out. But you see these really slight vocal accommodations that kind of reflect your social environment you’re in. So in that sense, everything’s always changing.  

Peng: But for most people, if you did not grow up speaking a language, you’re always likely to have traces of a foreign accent. It has something to do with the way our brains are wired. 

Kinzler: One thing that researchers sometimes say is that accent is a lagging indicator of proficiency when you learn a new language. It’s often the last thing to develop. 

As an adult, you can become just an incredibly proficient speaker of that language. Yet you know, you could speak two sentences to a native speaker and likely they’d be able to pick up instantly that you did not learn that language as a child.  

Peng: But somehow so many of us still think that accents are changeable on demand. Like it’s just a matter of effort. 

Kinzler: Some of the greatest social biases are against people who have properties that you think they could change and they’re choosing not to. I think accent often falls under this. Other examples are stigmas against obesity and stigmas against mental health. You get people thinking that, “Wow someone could just fix that about themselves, and they’re not doing it,” and therefore it’s stigmatized. 

People have this idea of, “Well, you should just, you know, speak more clearly or speak in a way that I understand you more.” And of course, anybody who’s taken a language class in high school or college knows how tremendously difficult it is. 

Peng: Basically, there’s a pretty big disconnect.

Mendoza: Right. And that gap, that disconnect, is the source of that feeling of frustration we were talking about at the start of the show. You know, when someone speaks to us with what we hear as a heavy accent, we get annoyed, even defensive. 

Ontiveros: People don’t feel like they’re discriminating against someone because of their race or their national origin.

Mendoza: Maria Ontiveros again.

Ontiveros: They’re saying, “I’m not discriminating against them because of where they’re from. I’m discriminating against them because I can’t understand them.” And they’re able to draw that distinction in their mind, even though we know that they’re completely intertwined.

[MUSIC] 

Mendoza: Things are changing some. The legal system is slowly figuring out that sometimes bias is masked as a communication problem. 

Ontiveros: Courts are becoming more and more open to really forcing employers to move beyond a simple statement of, “Well, we couldn’t understand her.” And asking additional questions such as, “What level of communication is required for this job?” And, “How do you evaluate this candidate’s speech?”

[MUSIC]

And then within company cultures, I do think that more education helps. People begin to understand, “OK, I can listen to that particular person.”

Peng: That last bit – that’s actually the kind of work that Marlene Schoenberg has devoted her life to. She’s Dominic’s communication coach. And so we asked her for some final words.

Mendoza: What advice would you give us in order to – to be better listeners?

Schoenberg: So I would put some rules at the beginning that helps [sic] people from both ends. You say, “Is it okay with you if I stop you, if I don’t get a word? Or may I repeat back what I think you said for verification?”  

Mendoza: Marlene also says that it’s helpful to be specific. 

Schoenberg: Because if somebody says, “Huh? What?” That doesn’t allow for furthering the communication. So if somebody speaks very softly, the listener needs to say, “Could you say that again a little louder, please?” “What was the last word in that sentence, please?” 

Peng: Mm-hmm.

Schoenberg: Or, “I got this part, but what did you say right before that?” 

Mendoza: So it sounds like it’s really about attitudes and how you approach each other.

Schoenberg: Yes, attitude is a huge, huge concept in this. If people decide they’re not going to understand someone, in fact, they won’t understand them. 

[MUSIC] 

Mendoza: Dominic and Marlene have stayed friends over the years. Besides his work at Chippewa Valley Technical College, Dominic also works independently as a motivational speaker. And he’s taken what he’s learned from Marlene. And now he uses it in his work and his life. 

Amegashitsi: Oftentimes when I’m expressing myself, I will acknowledge that I have an accent, and that there could be a chance that you may miss one or two of my words. So if you do, please don’t be ashamed to let me know, and I’ll be happy to go over it with you. And so I always put that up front.

Peng: Right.

Amegashitsi: To give the listener more confidence to ask questions if they were hesitant to do that. 

[MUSIC] 

Amegashitsi: I wasn’t doing the accent coaching to lose my accent. What I wanted to make sure that I do is not to lose people when I actually talk to them. And now I feel that way, so I feel like I’ve achieved my goal. 

Peng: Do you mean in a way, you want to preserve your accent? Is that something that you think is important for people to know? 

Amegashitsi: My accent is [a] portion of all the multiple languages that I can speak and all my experiences as a person. This is not something that’s necessarily going to go away. I may express myself much fluid and better, but the accent might stay with me, because that’s how I grew up. It’s just who I am.

[MUSIC] 

Peng: Thanks for listening! If you liked what you heard, please share this episode with your friends and family. Just hit the share button on whatever platform you’re on, or send them the link to our site: csmonitor.com/saythatagain. 

Mendoza: We want to thank Katherine Kinzler, special adviser to this podcast. She actually writes about accent discrimination in her book, “How You Say It.” This episode was written, reported, and produced by me, Jessica Mendoza.

Peng: And me, Jingnan Peng. The script was edited by Clay Collins and Trudy Palmer. Additional reporting by Samantha Laine Perfas. Sound design by Morgan Anderson and Noel Flatt. Additional sound elements from The Internet Archive.

Mendoza: This podcast was brought to you by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2022.