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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

As a midwestern white American, I've certainly had prejudices based on people's accents, and I've probably misjudged whether someone was a "native" speaker. Having read this article, I will renew my efforts to fight those ugly prejudices.

For a few years now, I've thought that the ideal work environment for encouraging diversity and inclusion would be an all-remote team that used only written communication, preferring asynchronous communication as much as possible. One advantage of such an environment would be that people like me couldn't judge others based on their accents. But then, I'm not ready to actually go to this extreme in my own work. I'm the cofounder of a tiny company, and my cofounder and I have several spoken conversations per day. I don't think either of us want to change that. Perhaps I could limit myself to written communication with any employees that we hire, but that feels like a double standard.

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On the other hand, somewhere in the region of 10-15%[1] of the UK population is dyslexic (I'd expect that to be similar in any English-speaking country), so exclusively-written communication will be somewhere between "unpleasant" and "awful" for them.

That, and people will start judging on grammar, ability to spell, word choice, etc, etc. I think you'd just be trading one set of prejudices for another.

[1]: https://www.cache.org.uk/news-media/dyslexia-the-facts

> On the other hand, somewhere in the region of 10-15%[1] of the UK population is dyslexic.

As an Brit, at least we live in a country where insulin is covered.

People’s writing ability is really variable as well though. Here in Iceland you get some comically translated written stuff in English purely because everyone thinks they know it well because they on the whole have a very high level of spoken English. That naturally holds true for native English speakers as well but probably with smaller variance.

Fair point. But, and I might be wrong here, I figure people can much more easily control their writing than their speech, especially if they're not expected to send an immediate written response (e.g. in chat). Perhaps my mental model of foreign accents is wrong, and forgive me if I'm being an ugly American here, but I've often thought of a foreign accent as a disability, as if the person had a stutter or other speech impediment.

do you feel the same about a regional accent - I mean southerners in the US often feel discriminated against as their accent is used as a shorthand for many negative stereotypes. What regional accent do you have?

My regional accent is midwestern (I'm from Kansas). I don't think I feel quite the same about regional accents, but of course, unconscious bias is a thing.

I have some sort of accent (I moved to the U.S at 10 after living in Germany for 4 years, Denmark in 6), but when I am in America, most Americans (maybe 99.9999% of them) think I'm from the U.S - although generally from some other part of the U.S than the one they're from.

I did have the experience of one guy thinking I was from Germany after 20 years in the U.S (hence the 99.+ percentile) but he was quite the outlier.

However when Americans meet me in Europe they immediately identify me as having a non-American accent, which really messes with all my European friends since they think of me as being essentially American.

So this disability thing seems quite context dependent.

There’s plenty of accents amongst native speakers. The way you feel about other people’s speaking voices is very much on you and belies a lack of worldliness. It’s a big place and I’d recommend checking it out. You do seem conscious of that though but it’s not something I’d accept personally.

I think that is common, when someone needs to translate something into English you know they just hand it to an intern with Word. I see the evidence of it on every public sign and document here in Denmark, but also traveling around in the rest of Europe.

"Native" is such a weird construct with language. I'm Scottish, and while I've lived in the US since early childhood, I still retain a few pronunciation "quirks" inherited from my parents. At least in my case, it's mostly to the amusement of friends (haha, you say "wheel" funny or "ooh, that rolled 'R' is sexy"). But still so strange, since I think my pronunciation is closer to "correct" than American's.

> "Native" is such a weird construct with language.

The article raised my awareness of that. That's why I put the one usage of "native" in the GP comment in quotes, and mostly avoided the word.

Yeah, I really struggle with the concept of "native" as well. I grew up in the US but the first language I spoke was Tamil. When I went to a nursery, I couldn't communicate with any of the other kids. My parents then spoke to me almost exclusively in English. As a result I can only speak/read/write English but can still understand Tamil at an elementary level.

I used to think I spoke perfect American English until someone pointed out that I say the th sound weirdly (I think it's called dental th-stopping [0]). I also spent some time in England as a child and now say some words like "rather" with the English pronunciation. I'm living in England again now as an adult and am picking up some English colloquialisms, though usually pronounced in an American accent.

I also unintentionally end up speaking in an Indian accent when I talk to speakers of Indian English, but can't put on (even intentionally) an English accent to save my life even though I had one when I lived in England as a child.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-stopping

I find this preference hard to fathom. Sure, written communication is great for much of the workday but sometimes you need nuance and, short of spending hours wordsmithing the right tone, it's better to meet face to face (or by video is that isn't possible). I say this as an English speaker that is completely comfortable with written words.

Maybe part of the problem is AV equipment? Once place I worked we had MAJOR communication difficulties with understanding Indian and SE Asian folks over the speakerphone. It was a perfect storm of unfamiliar inflections, vowels not being differentiated from each other strongly enough, consonants getting screwed up and rapid speech.

Really good headsets on both ears and repeated exposure seemed to resolve the discomfort and dread for many folks. I always wondered if there were similar complaints on the Asian side, I never heard anything about it. Do they find British/American accents hard to understand? I don't know.

Written communication is getting weirder (in a good way) by the day thanks to translation software.

With Deepl (and even Google Translate) I can communicate very well with anyone in German, Polish or any of the supported languages, while in person it would be impossible, as I don't know the language at all.

Google Assistant works, but it gets annoying real fast as it's slow and pretty cumbersome to use.

We are all Chinese rooms now.

For the uninitiated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

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