<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { margin-top: 0 ; margin-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>Getting rid of accents</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Arial" size="-1">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. </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="-1"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="-1">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.</font></div>
<div>-- <br>
Jim Wilce, Associate Professor<br>
Anthropology Department<br>
Box 15200<br>
Northern Arizona University<br>
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5200<br>
<br>
Fax 520/523-9135<br>
Office ph: 520/523-2729<br>
email: jim.wilce@nau.edu<br>
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.</div>
</body>
</html>