VIOLENCE OR REASON WHEN LANGUAGE ACCENTS ARE HEARD

“I love Puerto Rican accents” was the statement made by the listener. “Which one -was the answer- since people in San Juan might be very nasal and with less different degrees of variations in their pitch when compared with the “jibaros” in the mountains; and would not pronounce the ‘velar’ /r/ as they do in other parts of the island. How we respond to accents was one of the topics covered in one the many courses I had to teach at CCNY (full time lecturers and adjuncts are forced by the economic needs of colleges to teach as many as five different classes each semester), and part of my experience growing up in colonial Puerto Rico, as well as having lived, studied and worked for a long time in the continental USA. 

For many years, the TV weather man in Puerto Rico was a white Usamerican who spoke heavily accented Spanish. At home -and I guess all over the island- he was understood and made fun of: imitating Usamericans accented Spanish was part of how we responded to the colonizers, including, the fun we made of the priests and nuns that were brought early in the 20th Century to replace the Spaniards (at the time, in an island also colonized by pirates and populated by all kinds of peoples, becoming a priest or a nun was not encouraged by the families). Our brains and emotional “structures” respond to the speakers in different manners. It has been suggested that we can better process foreign-accented speech if we can identify the accent we hear or have some kind of relationship with the accented speaker of the given language, or we can block the speaker, if some internal emotional or neurological mechanism is at work.*

We can even be violent. In a different brief essay on this blog, I tell the story of the Quebecoise man who beat the shit out of a Parisian who made fun of his accent in a bar in Dublin. The man from Quebec was not prosecuted, and was sent home by the judge. My conclusion on the leniency of the Irish accented judge: he had been there with the Brits and knew how it felt when people refuse to understand you or make fun of how one speaks. Under the new social, racist and political climate, people in the USA who speak English with obvious “Spanish sounds influences” might end up imprisoned, if they do not have a passport. Avoid Greyhound buses is even advised in the Spanish media since Immigration agents are scavenging them in search for the brown-skinned foreigners polluting the nation. 

We can also stop speaking in the given language. At CCNY I heard many stories from USA born Puerto Rican students who dropped out from Spanish classes because the “enlightened and encyclopedic” professors would continuously correct their accents, and never paid attention to their ideas. I stopped talking to a dean and a colleague because it was obvious they were not willing or able to listen to me. And had a big clash with a white Usamerican feminist professor of Spanish who had the habit of repeating a particular Puerto Rican idiom I would use and then replacing it with the standard Spanish version. In another essay on this blog I write “no todas las chinas se chupan en Puerto Rico", ni todas las  “errres” are judged fairly.

*Sara Grey and Janet G. van Hell. “Foreign-accented speaker identity affects neural correlates of language comprehension”. Journal of Neurolinguistics, May 2017, 42: 93-108.