Are accents disappearing in international schools?

 

 What do you get when you put Chinese, Norwegian, Tunisian, English, Turkish, Korean, Malaysian, Spanish, Italian, Georgian, Hungarian, Japanese and American students into one class and have them taught by an Irishman living in the Netherlands? You get grade six in the American International School of Rotterdam. There is also one thing you certainly do not get: a standard accent. International school students are recognizable by their indefinable twang, ‘sort of like Canadian but not quite’. They deal with so many influences that somehow their accents end up being the common denominator of all of them. So what happened to Received Pronunciation? Many Dutch public schools still take their British accent very seriously, but international schools seem to have given up on it. Is it a thing of the past? And more importantly, does it matter?

 Research shows that the percentage of L2 English learners in international schools is significantly higher than native speakers, to the tune of about 65%. So being a student in a typical international school setting means being surrounded by many different versions of English. These versions are not ‘dialects’ of English, but simply manifestations of a lack of experience with English-speaking sounds. A Japanese student will have trouble with the r’s and l’s, whereas a French student will have more trouble with some of the diphthongs used in English. All in all a bit of a mess, or is it? One of the students in the above-mentioned sixth grade put it this way: ‘I never hear accents, I only notice pronunciation when I can not understand what the other person is saying.’ In other words, accent is irrelevant until it becomes a problem. This is a nice way to approach it; the only thing that counts is intelligibility. Of course there will be many English teachers cringing at this idea of poor pronunciation, especially the ones in British and American International schools.

 But can you even teach accents? It depends entirely on the setting. There are quite a few schools in Asia that rely on rote memorization and repetition to stimulate the development of a Standard American accent. Many students who follow L2 English in the Netherlands end up with quite the British accent. But these are settings in which the only source of accent is the teacher; English will typically not be spoken outside the classroom. In international schools the situation is entirely different; English is the language used to communicate with peers as well as with teachers. There is overwhelming evidence that suggests communication between peers is the main source for accent development. Which accounts for the fact that, in the long run, international school students all develop a similar accent, the ‘sort of like Canadian but not quite’ that was mentioned earlier. It is simply a perfectly natural amalgamation of all the influences they have had.

 Even if schools did find a way to teach accents properly, there would still be the question of which accent should be taught? British Received Pronunciation? Standard American? Accent-free? And if a school does decide to go with one accent, where are they going to find enough native speakers of that specific accent to staff the whole school? It would mean closing the door to people from Boston, New York, Liverpool, Belfast, Adelaide, East London, Edinburgh, Christ-Church and Johannesburg, to name but a tiny fraction. Does this not imply a particularly narrow-minded approach, exactly the opposite of what an international school should be showing? Not to mention the fact that there are underlying issues of discrimination here as well.

 Linguists have known for a long time that the perception of accents is inextricably linked to geographical location. In the United States, for example, a Michigander would consider a New York accent harsh and a Southern accent backward sounding. But these prejudices come from the perception of New York as a hard, criminal city and the Southern states as rural and uncivilized. In Britain someone with a Cockney accent would be considered a ‘wide boy’, or a criminal, and a West Country accent bearer would more than likely be seen as an uneducated farmer. Linguists have also known for a long time that this perception of inferior accents is based on nothing more than prejudice linked to social and geographical background. The ironic bit is that people who speak Standard American or Received Pronunciation do not realize that they have as much of an accent as anyone else. The only difference is that for some reason they have decided that their accent is the correct way of speaking.

 Unfortunately the world we live in still does prefer to hear people speak proper English. There have been studies on job eligibility and how important the role of accents is in this; the fact is that if you show an SA or RP accent you have at least 40% more chance of landing the job. Which is why schools in Hong Kong teach the American accent and schools in India still swear by the ‘Queen’s English’. This is like a large-scale worldwide version of the prejudice that still exists towards Cockney or Brummie accent, although it is something that will slowly evaporate as English becomes the world’s lingua franca.

 It is not very strange that the decline of (proper) accents is seen as correlating with a decline in the general quality of language. As stated previously in this essay, most accents that differ from the standard are seen as inferior. These lesser speakers must by default also have an inferior grasp of vocabulary and grammar and must be bringing the standard of English down. To a certain extent this might even ring true if the geographical origin of a certain accent is in a demographically poor area. Some areas in the Southern United States and the West Country in Britain are definitely more rural, which means that people there will probably be more focused on farming that on higher education. But it does definitely not mean that their accents make them inferior people. In international schools this idea of certain accents being inferior would be totally irrelevant and nothing short of racist.

 Accents in English are slowly but inevitably becoming a thing of the past, whether we like it or not. It is already happening on a small scale in international schools around the world, and with time will start happening in all layers of society. With it the built-in prejudices of judging by accent will disappear as well, giving people equal opportunities regardless of their origins and background. When people constructed Esperanto and envisioned it as a worldwide second or third language, they probably did not yet realize how pervasive the English language would become. With increasing globalization, the disappearance of borders, easier and cheaper travel and free instant worldwide communication, the ideal of global citizens with one common, accent-free language is closer than ever.