Getting rid of accents

[Jim Wilce]

The globalizing commodification of an American accent and its impact
on India was highlighted yesterday in a Morning Edition story on NPR
featuring outsourcing of service call handling.  Callers hired by US
companies but living in Bangalore, India, are trained to sound like
Americans and boast that they have never had a caller recognize their
non-American origin.  Indian corporate boosters talked about this
being a fine example of how Indians could take on a number of ways
without losing their essential Indianness.  But Arundhati Roy
(award-winning author of The God of Small Things) is among the
dissenters, stressing how offensive it is to tell people that their
way of speaking English is somehow less valuable than other ways.

Meanwhile, I am outside member on the PhD committee of a student from
India doing a corpus-linguistics based study of IE (Indian English),
testing the mostly-anecdotal "evidence" in the literature as to what
features constitute this variant. Even the latter sounds far too
essentialized, since she'll be focusing as well on the internal
diversity of IE, particularly register-based variation.  This
reflects the approach of her chair, Doug Biber.  The corpus
linguistics faction within sociolinguistics isn't much interested in
language ideologies, which seem (to me) obvisouly relevant in such
value-laden discussions of "accents" needing "reducing;" but they
argue that descriptive studies are needed first.
--
Jim Wilce, Associate Professor
Anthropology Department
Box 15200
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5200

Fax 520/523-9135
Office ph: 520/523-2729
email: jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22 (includes information on my 1998 book,
Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural
Bangladesh, ISBN 0-19-510687-3.  Call OUP's NYC office at
800/451-7556.
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