In Los Angeles, the accents say a lot
JUST YOUR AVERAGE day in cognitive-dissonance L.A., driving around town with the radio on: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Styrian accent comes at me like rubber bullets. A few lilting words from Beverly Hills’ new Iranian-born mayor. A staccato sound bite from a Vietnamese-born candidate for Orange County supervisor. A swirl of Greco-English vowels from Arianna Huffington.
And at a stoplight near the 405 Freeway, nailed to a telephone pole, there’s a sign telling me that I can reduce my accent by calling three-one-oh ....
Reduce my accent? Heck, I want to know where I can get one -- my political future would be guaranteed.
How can you not love a place like this? A few dozen movie stars try to master foreign accents, and millions of foreign-born immigrants wonder how to shed them.
Me, I like a world city to sound like one. I’d have to fill my ears with bathtub caulk if everyone here spoke Native Valley, delivered in high, nasal interrogatories that have to be as painful to enunciate as they are to listen to.
Be honest. There’ s an accent hierarchy -- “accent discrimination,” as a Texas university researcher put it.
Up near the top, where it’s been for eons, I give you the Oxbridge accent. I asked a British friend living here whether her plummy accent gives her a professional leg up, ahead of, say, a Russian or a Spanish accent. It shouldn’t, she says, but it probably does.
Down the scale are south-of-the-Rio Grande accents, but surely those have been creeping up in status since all those Hispano-Oscar nominations. Certainly since 9/11 they’ve ranked ahead of Middle Eastern-ish accents, anything that sounds south of Borat and west of Bollywood. Scandinavian and French and Italian accents -- any place that makes movies with grown-up sex scenes -- always rank well.
David Alan Stern used to live here and coach actors such as Forest Whitaker, Lynn Redgrave and Julia Roberts for their roles. Now he lives in Connecticut and teaches just-folks to refine their accents, Brooklyn or Bengali, with CDs like “The Sound and Style of American English.”
“It’s not a question,” he said, “of whether someone has or doesn’t have an accent. It’s a question of whether that particular accent is interfering with intelligibility, understandability.”
That can leave the listener with the wrong impression -- the short syllables and swift, more monotone delivery of South Asians, for example, may convey an aloofness that the speaker never intends.
The Angelenos who come to Lisa Mojsin for help are accomplished professionals who want to accomplish more.
“Some people,” she said, “hear an accent and assume things about you” -- meaning negative things. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s real.”
Still, the accentuated ones deserve props for trying. I’m gobsmacked by lingua-isolated Americans who don’t learn another language and by immigrants who live here for 20 or 30 years and never learn English.
For those who do take on English-as-she-is-spoken, Mojsin, a polyglot who founded the accent-reduction school Accurate English, understands their pain -- the elusive pacing and vocal range of spoken English, the treachery of American vowel sounds. She has been helping a Latin American veterinarian who’s gotten into trouble with the second syllable in “worksheet,” and a native Spanish speaker whose boss’ name is Doug, a word the woman invariably pronounces as “dog” -- not a good career move.
“The success story,” Mojsin said, is seeing their new confidence and bosses who call and say “everyone understands them at work!”
One of Mojsin’s students, Lily, works for a big multinational company. She speaks Thai and two Chinese languages -- but believes that she’s taken “less seriously” because of her accented English. She reads her e-mail into a tape recorder to practice diminishing her accent, to be ready to take on bigger accounts and bigger clients.
Another student, Sev, is a French architect who works as a designer at a Los Angeles firm. She sought out Mojsin after realizing she wasn’t connecting on the phone; the consultants and engineers she needed to reach kept asking her to repeat herself.
On top of that, she said, “I’m a girl, I’m young and I’m French. I just wanted to have more confidence.”
But remember the ooh-la-la factor: When people found out Sev was trying to rein in her accent, some of them -- including her boss -- said, “Oh, you have a cute accent; you’re not going to lose it, are you?”
As someone with an intonation as flatly American as the Great Plains, I’ve got a case of accent envy. I yearn for a lilt in my language. Writer Rosecrans Baldwin has sagely argued that “a fake accent can be handy in a lot of cultural jams, especially since the entire world hates us right now.” Maybe I’ll try Canadian. Canadian should be easy. A smattering of “ehs?,” an “aboot” or two and a couple of NHL references could help me dodge any argument about the war in Iraq.
What we really need to cultivate is a unique Los Angeles accent for our distinct urban Babel. Back in 1983, when Stern wanted to get hired as dialect coach for what would become the wildly popular TV miniseries “The Thorn Birds,” the studio answered with this letter: “Thank you very much for your interest ... however, Australian and New Zealand accents will not be used in this project because the film will be shot in Burbank.”
Does anyone speak Burbankian?
