Language- When An Accent Becomes An Issue

Language Name Institutional Affiliation Raymond Hernandez’s article, When an accent becomes an issue; Immigrants turn to speech classes to reduce sting of bias, published on March 1993, is an account of how immigrants’ accents have caused them problems, pushing them to attend speech classes to get rid of it. According to Raymond, the city of New York has undergone numerous changes with immigrants making up part of the population. However, their accents still serve as a source of stigma. They not only face challenges because of their thick accent, but also discrimination, ridicule, and hostility. Thus, it has forced them to take up speech lessons. The main argument is that discrimination due to accents and dialects has been rampant in the United States. Apart from immigrants, people from the south, residents of Brooklyn and African Americans have faced similar treatment. But immigrants have borne the brunt of the suffering. For instance, an immigrant from Colombia named Carmen sought for classes to eliminate her accent due to fear of talking in front of her classroom. Also, immigrants have faced numerous challenges at work such as failure to be promoted and losing jobs due to their accents. For example, a Dominican born lady working as a senior accountant in a corporation had to enroll in accent-eliminating classes. In two of her recent job reviews, her bosses disparaged her thick accent as impossible to understand even though she had worked for the organization for twenty years. Also, the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1992 filed a court case against a company based in California for firing a native Indian employee citing his accent as dissimilar to the company’s image. What I found most interesting is that there are lessons that one can take to eliminate an accent. Even though experts believe that immigrants do not need to change their language for anyone, a majority of them go ahead to enroll for speech coaching offered by tutors, private businesses and higher institutions to reduce their accents. I believed that a twang is a language that an individual takes up as they learn how to speak in childhood. Also, I thought that an individual could not eliminate their accents by learning a new language as speech lessons teach how to converse only. Therefore, finding out that colleges in the 1990s offered up to...