How People React to Accents in Everyday Life: My Observations
My spouse and I on voting day for our second session of volunteering for the French polling station for the European Union elections. June 9, 2024.
Shortly after receiving my French citizenship, I signed up to volunteer for the French polling station in my area where French citizens could come to vote in a European Union election.
The two-day, sixteen-hour experience gave me a nice little microcosm within which I could reflect on the types of reactions I get as an immigrant with an accent.
Now, these are different reactions than the kinds a person gets when speaking a foreign language in a tourist context or even in a hospitality context—such as at a restaurant or hotel—when the interlocutor doesn’t know if the person with an accent is a tourist or an immigrant.
These are the reactions you get when people know or can assume by context that you are a migrant or immigrant and must collaborate with or function alongside you for a given function or task. (For my take on these terms, read this earlier post I wrote about how I consider and use terms like immigrant and migrant and so on.)
These types of reactions? They’re wide and they’re telling.
Let’s review the rundown.
People Immediately Dislike You
Let’s just come out of the gate with the worst reaction, why don’t we?
One woman in my volunteering cohort—a general know-it-all, and we all know that type—didn’t have a single direct interaction with me before she decided that she did not like me. Not one single bit.
Throughout the twelve-hour day, she nudged several microaggressions my way. I got treated to condescension when she couldn’t avoid addressing me, interruption and talking-over when the group needed to confer and I spoke up, and a big production made out of looking past me to someone else to ask for help even when I happened to be the closest available person.
This example didn’t have the flavor of some of the other negative reactions I mention below. In this case, my immigrant status seemed to flare up serious dislike.
And yep, that’s definitely a reaction I’ve encountered many a time. Can’t surprise anyone reading this that some people in this world really, really do not like immigrants.
People Assume They Can’t Trust You with Tasks
The head of our group of volunteers accepted me well enough, but he seemed unsure about whether he could trust me with tasks.
You sometimes get this reaction because someone assumes an accent indicates incompetence or idiocy. Because I don’t speak exactly like a native, I must be stupid.
In this guy’s case, though, his assumption that he’d better not give me something to do seemed to come from either his inability to determine whether I understood the instruction due to my accent or because he couldn’t quite read my linguistic intonations and nonverbal cues in the same way he could read those of the native speakers in our group.
As a result, unlike how he operated with the other volunteers—all native speakers—he only gave me tandem tasks to do.
People Speak to You Slowly or Loudly (or Both)
You’ve heard this one before, and it’s absolutely true: When you open your mouth and someone realizes you’re not a native speaker, they may speak to you loudly or slowly or both.
Now, hey. Sometimes, especially with some native speakers who don’t tend to enunciate and who even their friends have trouble understanding—we all have that friend—this reflex is quite nice. While I understand my second language spoken at normal speed just fine, I’m not going to balk at someone speaking it to me slowly and clearly.
Unless, that is, they speak to me so slowly and so clearly that they’re embarrassing us both.
After a few hours, I didn’t have this issue with my fellow volunteers. With people who came to vote, though, I had it happen over and over again. For twelve hours.
People Tell You They Can Speak Your Language
Another woman came to volunteer only for the afternoon. She was very sweet to me as we worked together at the ballot box. Shortly after we met, though—I’d say within the first three phrases—she told me she could speak English with the clear implication that if I was finding the effort to speak French too difficult, we didn’t have to speak French.
I simply told her that we could certainly speak English if she preferred, but that I was fine in French.
Side note: She also assumed I was English, which I only realized when she asked me how it was to live through Brexit and I responded that it didn’t affect me at all. Ha!
In this woman’s case, her offer of English seemed to come from a desire to be helpful and I took it as such. I have, though, had plenty of experiences where people have told me they speak English with an almost defensive posture, as though I’m one-upping them by speaking a foreign language. (Humans and their egos, I tell you.)
People Refuse to Let You Speak Their Language
This won’t happen with every language, but with English being the predominant second language these days (the new lingua franca—and how’s that for irony in my French-as-a-second-language case), many people speak at least a few words of the language.
These people may not offer to speak English to you at first, but when you launch in by speaking their language, they then either need to give you concrete proof that they speak your native language or will refuse to speak their language with you, as though they speak your language better than you speak theirs. (In most cases, I promise you, they do not.)
In my case, this dynamic results in a weird bout of conversational swordplay during which I respond to their English in French and vice versa until either the conversation concludes or someone concedes.
To tell you it’s bizarre would be an understatement. Someone needs to do this type of exchange as a sketch comedy skit.
People Will Treat You with More Forgiveness and Openness
Two other people in my volunteering cohort seemed to immediately warm toward me thanks to my accent, as though they recognized the effort I’d taken to learn the language to a level of fluidity and, in their minds, this meant good things about me.
Whether their assumption is true—I like to think it is, but hey, of course I would—I love this reaction, especially given how rarely it appears compared to the others.
People who have this reaction to a foreign accent may ask questions about my background and where I learned French, but they almost never make jab-style comments about me as a “foreigner” or make fun of my accent and any language-level mistakes I may make. Even if they think all these things, they don’t act them out or verbalize them. I am eternally grateful for these people.
People Will Want to Help You
Sometimes—and even for the same reasons an accent can generate negative reactions—people who hear an accent will want to help the nonnative speaker.
This can happen because people generally don’t expect someone to have an accent. When you have one, then, they’re surprised.
Throwing people off balance always gets their attention—sometimes for the good and sometimes for the not so good. But in these people’s cases, an accent makes them feel benevolently superior to you in the same way they might feel with a child.
This type of reaction helped our entire volunteering crew immensely when it came to asking voters to volunteer to return in the evening to count the votes and supervise the vote counting. In fact, whereas other volunteer cohorts had trouble recruiting voters for the job, we had our quota filled far, far in advance of needing to worry about coming up short, all thanks to me doing the asking with my goofy little accent.
Not All Reactions are Bad!
Surprised that not all of these reactions are necessarily negative? Don’t be. Reactions to immigrants and nonnative speakers run the gamut, just as do human reactions to, well, almost anything.
And really, the accent thing is only one of the many types of bizarre reactions people have to people who come from other countries of origin, as I documented in a previous post about weird things that happen to foreigners beyond the language-and-accent realms.
The nice thing is that, for many of these reactions, you can turn them into an advantage.
In the worst of cases, I know exactly who I don’t want to spend a single second more of my time around. In the best of cases, I can lean into the accent and my foreignness as an element of surprise to focus attention and get things done more efficiently.
Sure, I still find a lot of reactions I get aggravating. But so it goes, and what can I do about it? Not much but roll along and find the silver linings wherever I can.