It all started as is often the case, with Advertising on Instagram. “No one tells you this if you are an immigrant, but accent discrimination is a fact,” the woman said in the video. Her accent is slightly Eastern European – so subtle that I only noticed it after a few listens.
The ad was for BoldVoice, an artificial intelligence-based “accent training” app. A few clicks took me to “Oracle Accent” which promised to guess my native language. After reading the long phrase, the algorithm announced: “Your accent is Korean, my friend.” Conceited. But impressive. I’m actually Korean.
I have lived in the US for over ten years and my English is beyond proficient. You could say yes hyperfluent – for example, my diction is probably two standard deviations above the national average. But that still doesn’t mean “native”. I learned English so late that I missed the critical moment to acquire a native accent. This is a distinction that can lead to some complications depending on the era. In the Book of Judges it is said that the Gileadites used the word “shibboleth” to identify and kill fleeing Ephraimites who could not pronounce the word shh sound and said “sibboleth” instead. In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the death of any Haitian who could not pronounce a Spanish word parsley (parsley) in what became known as the Parsley Massacre.
So the stakes were high, as the Accent Oracle listened non-stop to my conversations, at one point scoring 89 percent (“Slightly accented”) and at other times 92 percent (“Native or almost native”). The spread was alarming. On a bad day I could have been murdered. To increase my chances of survival, I signed up for a free, one-week trial.
Is average quality of transmission to accents. How you say that something often reveals more – about your background, class, education, interests – than What you say. In most societies, phonetic mastery becomes a form of social capital.
As with everything else, now the AI has decided on an accent. Companies like Krisp and Sanas sell real-time accent “neutralization” for call center workers, smoothing out a Filipino agent’s voice into something more understandable to a customer in Ohio. The immediate reaction from the anti-AI camp is that it is “digital whitewashing,” a capitulation to imperial, monolithic English. This is often portrayed as a racial issue, perhaps because advertisements for these services feature people of color and call centers are located in places such as India and the Philippines.
But that would be too hasty. Modulating speech for social benefit is an old story. Remember this George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion— and its musical adaptation, My Beautiful Lady— depends on whether Henry Higgins transformed Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney accent. Even the eminent German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte got rid of his Saxon accent after moving to Jena for fear that people would not take him seriously if he sounded peasant.
This is not a relic of the past. AND 2022 UK Study found that the “accent prestige hierarchy” persists and has changed little since 1969: a quarter of working adults report some form of accent discrimination at work, and almost half of respondents say they have been ridiculed or singled out in a social context.
In Hacker News Thread announcing the launch of BoldVoice, one commenter wrote, “I would rather strive for a world where accents matter less than correcting accents.” Well, tell that to the countless Koreans in this country navigating the treacherous phonetic divide between beach AND female dog Or coke AND cock. This online comment was typical of the usual sanctimonious pablum, the kind of casual moral high ground that only a native English speaker or someone willfully unaware of the daily indignities faced by foreigners could hope for.