Try to overcome our prejudice about accents
AN accent is a colouring or flavouring to your speech that influences the sounds and shapes of words and sentences.
Accents are associated with social groups: regional such as Birmingham, or social such as upper class.
Everyone has an accent; no one is accent-free. And for every accent there exists, there’s somewhere a group of people who react badly to it. These reactions are the result of prejudice – an unreasoned jumping to judgment. Everybody has prejudices about accents – I certainly do.
My studies and my experience of working with people from a wide range of backgrounds have led me to abandon these prejudices.
However, I still have prejudices that I find difficult to control in relation to one accent.
Prejudices about accents are undesirable, but powerful, and very easily learned and some individuals modify their accents to sound more “refined” when talking to people outside their immediate circle of family and friends.
Our accent is actually made up of so many different parts that all add up. You have word stress, sentence intonation, rhythm, the expressions you use and so much more.
And each dialect has its own accent and peculiarities. You would think this would be easy enough, because most languages (unlike English) are phonetic (pronounced exactly as they are written, with very few exceptions).
Unfortunately for learners, these pronunciations are sometimes not the same as in English, and some don’t resemble any sound in English.
When learning a language, you may have to change how you pronounce certain consonants, making them longer or moving your tongue to a different position in your mouth, but there is one single sound that is highly associated with English speakers that reveals your “secret” immediately and you should work hardest on it if you don’t want it known immediately that Bahasa Melayu is your native language.
Don’t judge yourself and others by your accent.
No matter where, we are always proud to speak in our mother tongue, because the language represents the nation.