One of the most common complaints I hear when there is a gathering of people around my age, is the difficulty they have in understanding the accents that proliferate in our diverse and outsourced world. I understand the complaint, as I have spoken to help desks from Singapore to Romania in my quest to get help with a computer and found myself struggling to understand directions spoken with a heavy accent.
However, this matter of accents is not new, and I first confronted that fact years ago right here in our English-speaking country. My newly minted Second Lieutenant husband had been assigned to a base in the south and I had been able to get a teaching job in the nearby town’s elementary school. It was the first year that the school system had been integrated and they were desperate for teachers which is why I, a history major, was hired at the end of a very cursory interview. Two hours after that meeting, I was standing with a stack of books in hand in front of a sixth-grade class. My orientation had been a cheery wave from the quickly disappearing school principal, and 30 sets of eyes fixed on my inwardly terrified person.
But I really knew I was in an unfamiliar land that day when I marched with my class to the lunchroom from which emitted a unidentifiable smell. That identity was clarified when a voice from my lined-up class uttered the fateful words, “Yay, my favorite lunch --- boiled bologna, collard greens and grits.” I then knew for certain that I had entered a foreign country.
That conviction only continued as I struggled to understand what my students were saying in their very heavy southern accents. I thought there was a difference between ‘farther’ and ‘father’ but not to them. In the course of time, I no longer grappled to understand these young people, and in turn the class grew accustomed to me. As one of them told me as the year progressed and we got to know each other, “You talk funny, but we like you anyway.”
Perhaps that last statement, uttered years ago by a eleven-year-old in a world that was rapidly changing around her, is what we should all take away from this accent business. That foreign voice on the phone may talk ‘funny,’ but they are hard at work trying to help us and perhaps we can be understanding and like them anyway.