By Zhea Jordaan
accent
noun
1. An accent can be regarded as that which influences the shape and sound of an individual’s words
Why are some accents regarded as better than others? We sat down with Media Studies professor Adam Haupt at the University of Cape Town, who brought attention to the systemic nature of class which instinctively complicates our understanding of race and therefore identity. The interpersonal pressures of people of colour prevail in the way privilege and space is constructed. As a person of colour, you may possess a certain amount of access to privilege, but you must still navigate these differential spaces that not only gives you access to racialized privileges but are also institutionally geared toward Anglocentric norms. Thus, being in certain spaces that gives you privilege does not automatically mean that you can navigate these spaces (like UCT for example) which has a particular set of norms in place. Moreover, this may come across as failing to acknowledge the diversity in Cape Town based communities.
Anglo-normativity is one way to understand how a particular kind of English and everything that gets associated with it is more often than not, performed by individuals with diverse backgrounds and whose first language is not English. This performance of English correctness gets equated with intelligence and excellence in certain spaces and institutions such as model-c schools, for instance. Professor Haupt references Frantz Fanon regarding the idea of having to internalize particular ideas about civilization and humanity which are incredibly Eurocentric and Anglophilic. People then feel the internal pressure to divorce and separate themselves from where they come, by ultimately "bleaching" their roots. And so, the question of language comes in to play- how do you navigate yourself in a space that expects you to be and speak the way you were not initially conditioned to? The answer lies in code switching and code mixing. Code switching is not necessarily a bad thing considering it is an integral part of what it means to be multilingual. But, one may ask, how do you learn, grow and succeed in these spaces while simultaneously staying true to your linguistic inheritance as well as your religious and cultural background? And even more so, are these spaces welcoming of people from diverse cultures whose English does not fit the normative yardstick of what it means to be “proper”?
“You might get a kid who comes from a multilingual home but goes to an English dominated school enforcing only English in the classroom and after school in the hostels. They then go back to their family and can no longer speak their native tongue.”
Haupt drew on his own experiences as a child who grew up speaking Afrikaans, only to make the strategic decision not to be placed in the Afrikaans medium classrooms as it was implicit in his mind that “the bright kids go to the English medium class and the not-so-bright kids go to the Afrikaans class”. He then moved from a school with an Afrikaans dominated medium to an English one. This leads one to question what exactly is being internalized in the minds of individuals from their formative years already. Hence, “And then because I was one of the brighter kids I believed I didn’t belong at an Afrikaans medium school, and so I went to another school”. When Haupt visited his family in the northern suburbs, which is largely Afrikaans, he then had a tough time assimilating and grappling with the language that used to occur organically. As he grew older, the more distanced he became from his mother tongue, the more challenging it became for him to engage with the language due to years of code switching and unlearning what he believed to be a language not carrying as much esteem as the English language.
The idea of fragmentation surfaces in the way colonial ideologies about the self become internalized. And in the process, you find yourself trying to shed certain parts of who you are, including language and the way you speak- essentially, accents. This fragmentation points to a sort of loss of identity or perhaps the rebirth of a new one as you assimilate into the dominant ideology of linguistic and even cultural practices. Embedded in these sites of socialization are subtle and often, not so subtle messages about what kind of accent is favoured and which accent/s or ways of articulation are policed.
Articulation, much like language is fluid. One can almost feel oneself changing and adapting to a given space and situation. In this way, Language is merely a performance and similarly, a performativity to language. Theatre director, actress and activist, Ameera Conrad, describes code switching as “that thing where you have to pretend to be someone else”. Ameera describes it as projecting herself outside of her body to observe a space and the situation in order to decide which character to play, and thus which accent to use. “I now do it consciously, but I used to do it subconsciously. It’s the idea of knowing which aspect of yourself is going to vocally and physically step forward and handle the situation”. It then becomes a subtle thing- the way that you write, how well you articulate yourself, and how well you master this one particular language. Thus, being multilingual is not valued as intellect unless you have also managed to master English- and impeccably so.
There is a degree of professionalism that is linked to language and the way you speak. What does it mean to be professional and who decides this, one might ask? It is very much a touch-and-go situation, because there is a historic idea of what it means to be professional, but what it really comes down to is that professional speech is anything that allows you to excel at what you are doing, be it a social setting, a job context, and so fourth. In this way, the way you speak grants you access into certain spaces hence Ameera Conrad’s opinion that “at the end of the day, you’re always putting on a performance to get what you want”.