Is there prejudice against Indian English?

Several years ago I tutored an Indian man who had lived in the United States for more than 20 years. What he wanted to do was to change his accent. Although he was a naturalized American citizen and had clearly mastered English, he was starting his own business in San Diego and wanted to sound more 'American,' especially on the phone. He believed that when people heard his "Indian" accent, they were more likely to dismiss him or his product.

Later, I realized what he was talking about as last year, I had to deal with several customer support people for last minute flight and hotel cancellations. (Unexpectedly, my husband had to be hospitalized.) By the end of my conversations, I was feeling angry and frustrated with the representatives of the airlines and hotel who were obviously not speakers of American English and were likely "outsourced" employees of these companies. They sounded like "Indians," but even more irritating was that their expressions were obviously rehearsed (constant repetition of the same lines) and sometimes inappropriate. I didn't feel that they fully understood my English, and I certainly didn't understand a third of theirs.

Since the many Englishes of the world are a focus of this blog, I'm presenting some of the links I visited recently on the topic of Indian (African, Asian, etc.) English. A recent article in The Times of India concerns the plight of Indian English speakers.

As a result of all this interest in speaking a 'standard' English, however, there are lots of employment opportunities for British and American ESL teachers equipped to instruct accent reduction courses. Here's a link discussing what is meant by "accent neutralization" or reduction. Working on accents is big business now because of all the outsourcing of phone sales agents to other countries. There are many tech-support centers based in India (click here) which are trying to cope with the problem of producing agents that have mild accents and appropriate sociolinguistic skills to handle phone talk.

There has been some backlash to the pressure on Indians to change their accents, and I ran across one blog suggesting that Indian English should be recognized as a major English of the world and that Indians should not have to adjust their accents to suit our ears.

Finally, I offer you an amusing 1.5 minute clip of Peter Sellers imitating various British accents on 'YouTube' and a more serious discussion of the variety of English accents from the British Library's collection. You can spend a lot of time here delving into the library's various links and listen to different accents while reading transcripts.

What does "evacuation" mean?

The past few days have been a bit of a stressful blur, but nowhere near as stressful as it's been for the thousands of San Diegans who lost their homes during this week's fires. Almost exactly four years ago, our community was the worst hit by the Cedar Fires, so when we got evacuated (look at meaning #4a under transitive verb and meaning #1 under intransitive verb) on Monday, there was a lot more fear and understanding of how fast windblown fires can travel and how much devastation can follow in their wake. Very fortunately Mother Nature spared our home again and didn't touch our community. For detailed coverage of the recent events, check out Wildfires 2007.

Some more commentary on our "Many Englishes"

Just thought I'd give you a quick link to another site which talks about "Many Englishes". This page has some short listening materials on the topic that would make a good warm-up for an advanced listening/speaking class discussing today's international language (click here). Steven Pinker and Stephen Fry make some observations about the many different Englishes used around the world. Is one English "better" or more "standard" than another?

Putting myself in the position of a student

To be a good ESL instructor, many would say that you have to have taught English in a foreign country. Perhaps even more important, in my opinion, is to have studied a foreign language yourself. I've never taught English abroad, but I have studied several foreign languages in public school and the university. In addition, I had an immersion experience the first time I did anthropological fieldwork (studying chimpanzees) in Africa.

Our research base camp was actually in the heart of a Congolese village in the Equateur region of the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly called Zaire). Despite being able to get by in French in the towns and cities, it was of no value in the village of Wamba. Lingala was the lingua franca of the area, and with no Lingala books or dictionary at hand, I essentially tromped out to the forest every day with people whose language was totally foreign and tried to pick it up by ear.

Thank goodness I'd studied a number of quite different languages by that time (Spanish/French, Quechua, Japanese, and Arabic), for varying lengths of time (6 mos to several years) . You might say I have always been fascinated by language, and the experience in Zaire/DRC has had the biggest impact on my ESL teaching career.

From that first-hand experience learning a second language as an adult through immersion in a work/research setting, I learned very well some of the differences between learning from a book and learning through communication. I also learned that making a lot of mistakes and sometimes being stressed to the point of tears and humiliation forced me to become communicative in a rather short period of time (about five weeks). There was no time for translation; whenever I spoke, I found out quickly if people understood what I said. They didn't correct my grammar, so I have no idea if the quality of my speech was TV or radio broadcast-quality Lingala, which was usually mixed with lots of French. Nevertheless, though I've been away from the language for more than a decade, some expressions have stuck, like the farewell from one of my favorite trackers Iyokango "Dimanche" - Soki Nzambe alingi, tokomonana ntango mosusu. We'll see each other again, God willing....

Recently, to try to recapture the exhilaration of being able to communicate in a foreign language again, I decided to do an English-for-Japanese language exchange with a former student who still lives in San Diego, but no longer formally studies English. S. is trying to learn Spanish now and does volunteer work, visiting with elderly people, practicing her conversational English, and awaiting the birth of her first child.

How does it feel to study Japanese with a former ESL student? I was definitely a bit stressed about it. She had never heard me speak Japanese, and now she knows how truly limited I am. Though not a trained instructor, she has done language exchanges before. I told her I didn't want English translations, but explanations in Japanese. Synonyms. Lots of examples of how to use an expression. She did a good job in her role of teacher. I guess time will tell what kind of student I am, but I got home feeling ambitious (though I wonder now how I'm going to squeeze some Japanese language studies into my schedule).

As I always tell my students, "you'll be surprised at how much English you'll understand after studying it here in San Diego, even if you don't use it again for years." Happily, this was true for me with Japanese as I was able to understand most of what S. was saying this week, even though I haven't used Japanese for many years. To my delight, I can still recognize a lot of kanji and read the phonetic scripts (hiragana and katakana) too (read a little about my translation experience). However, output in Japanese is a different matter. Must practice what I preach now! Oh yes, remember, Evelyn? Practice makes perfect. Use it, or lose it?!