Chapter . Advance the Conversation: This Is How I Talk

1.1

Raised in the rural South, Mike never thought much about how he spoke until he enrolled at a university in the Midwest. After he moved to campus, Mike’s roommates started teasing him about his accent, calling him “hick” and “redneck.” Although he laughs it off, Mike has become self-conscious. Afraid of being stereotyped, he now rarely speaks up in class and dreads oral presentations. But his biggest concern is that he wants to be a lawyer, and attorneys do a lot of public speaking.

As you’re leaving your political science class one day, Dr. Brenner calls you over to a conversation he’s having with Mike about the college’s mock trial team — a competitive activity where students simulate trial lawyers by delivering opening statements, questioning witnesses, and presenting closing statements. You’ve been on the mock trial team for a year and feel that you have benefited from it. You tell Mike that the team is great preparation for law school.

Mike looks unsure. “I don’t like talking in front of people around here,” he says. “They think I’m stupid ’cause of the way I talk.” Dr. Brenner tells him that enrolling in a voice and diction class could help with his accent. Mike says, “I don’t think it’s right to change who I am. It’d be disrespecting my family. I’ll probably just wind up going to law school back home anyway.”

After Mike leaves, Dr. Brenner turns to you and says, “Will you talk to him and see if he’ll reconsider?”

Accents are a common basis for stereotypes. U.S. citizens consistently rate the South as a place where accented speech portrays residents as backward or uneducated (Preston, 1999; Preston, 2002). Even when a southern accent is perceived as friendly or polite, listeners may still question the speaker’s competence. Such judgments aren’t reserved solely for southerners, however; many nonnative English speakers are also stereotyped if they have heavily accented speech (Burlage, Marafka, Parsons, & Milaski, 2004; Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010).

Although such judgments are clearly wrong, they persist because accents signal cultural difference. In fact, accents may be more important than appearance in marking others as cultural outgroupers (Raki´c, Steffens, & Mummendey, 2011). This is an important distinction because people feel less certain about and uncomfortable around those whom they judge as culturally different.

However, accents can create unfavorable judgments for another reason. Heavy accents can make it difficult to understand messages, leading listeners to question the speaker’s credibility (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010). When an accent becomes a hindrance to being understood by others, pursuing a class or training to reduce these effects might be appropriate to consider.

Before you act, consider the facts of the situation, and think about the research on accented speech. Also, reflect on what you’ve learned so far about conveying immediacy and projecting a powerful speech style.