Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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Do you really doubt pg's claim that an accent strong enough to impede comprehension is a barrier to creating a successful startup in Silicon Valley? The importance of this is undoubtably a piece of common sense that some need to hear, but really, it is common sense.

As a founder you need to interact with customers, vendors, employees and investors. If those groups have trouble understanding your speech, then how could you not have a problem?

Really, this is not a debatable point among sensible people. The only part that is debatable is which accents are strong enough to pose a major problem.

Unfortunately most people don't seem to logically process what was said before deciding to argue. They just pattern match. If the pattern looks like something they argue with, then they argue. So people pattern match on his argument, see the word "accent", and argue on the basis of his comment being thinly veiled xenophobia. Which could not be farther from the truth!

This, honestly.

As european (and italian), I can confirm most of what Antirez said.

Moreover, founding a startup (or running a business, or working as an account, or working as a diplomat) is undoubtly much more difficult when you have to work with people speaking a foreing language.

The truth is that not just "accents", but also slang, technical lingo and even local humour come into play when you have to decode whether the person you are speaking with is really angry, sarcastic or she is just joking.

Things get even worse when you can't see those you are speaking with.

I don't think PG claims that strong accents are a barrier to creating successful startups in Silicon Valley, they just add up yet another hurdle that founders (and employees alike) must overcome to make that startup successful.

Therefore, such hurdles, must be accounted for.

but also slang, technical lingo and even local humour

One of my favourite bits of (UK) english that I regularly find myself having to explain to people is the difference between "bollocks", meaning that something awful has occurred and "the bollocks", meaning that something is amazing.

Americans have the same thing (different root though). "Shit" vs "The Shit"

IMHO, it's not which accents are strong enough. It's the baggage that an accent brings. Yes, people pattern match an accent but not just the words. For example, the content of what a woman with a strong French accent says will be diluted with thoughts of sexiness instead of being taken seriously (except Christine Lagarde :-)). In this sense, the validity of PG's claim is not cut and dry. There are other factors.

In environments outside of tech hubs like the Silicon Valley bubble, I would strongly agree. For instance a friend's wife moved from Georgia to San Diego as a teenager, and quickly found that as long as she kept her accent, everyone assumed she was stupid.

In Silicon Valley there are so many people from all over the USA, and from other countries, that this type of bigotry is less important. I can't promise it will entirely not be an issue, but I doubt it would be a big deal.

>For instance a friend's wife moved from Georgia to San Diego as a teenager, and quickly found that as long as she kept her accent, everyone assumed she was stupid.

In fairness, speaking as someone from Georgia, you run into a lot of this within the south. I've lived here my entire life, and generally speak with a fairly neutral, midwestern accent, and I'd say that it's extremely common within the roughly 35 and under demographic around here.

Not commenting on whether it's fair or not, but because there is such a stigma around southern accent = stupid, many southerners, especially younger ones, make a concerted effort not to pick up the accent. Generally, the younger and better educated a southerner is, the less likely they are to sound like a southerner. That's not because the accent makes someone stupid, but because there is an awareness that it has that perception, so people avoid it.

And, I mean, I'll still fall into it in less formal settings or when I'm cranking up the charm, but in a business environment it gets switched off.

It's not bigotry, but lack of investment in conversational English is frequently accompanied with lack of investment in vocabulary and idiomatic English expressions.

If you work at a large Silicon Valley company, there's always that one meeting where someone at the table, while obviously smart, speaks such an incomprehensible version of English, that whenever suggestions from their end are vocalized, everyone looks at one another with silent "did you get that?", nods politely and then moves on.

I don't think so. Diluting a speakers content into cultural bias implies that the content of the speech is understood to begin with. This is not the case for what I'd call a strong accent. Those strong accent are too far away from a locution I can make sense of. A strong accent makes it hard to grasp the words that are said. And if you're in a venture perspective and nobody can make sense of the words that are getting out of your mouth, I believe it's fair to say that your strong accent is a problem.

From my limited point of view, I have noticed that some speakers with strong accents seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are hard to understand. They speak grammatically correct sentences and they sit on that knowledge seemingly thinking it's enough, that it's me who's stupid for not understanding what they said. The problem in those cases is that through their confidence, they try to speak too fast for their ability to clearly pronounce words and their syllables, which results in a long stream of garble to my ear.

English is my second language, French being my native tongue, and I do have an accent myself, but I try to speak individual words and syllables clearly. I still have an accent, maybe 'strong' but I'm pretty sure everybody can understand clearly the words I speak, or at least most of the time.

My wife is also learning English as a second language, Vietnamese being her mother tongue. Recently she's been improving a lot in her classes and begun to be overconfident in her ability to speak, trying to use contractions everywhere. Consequently, she's been having a harder time to communicate with others. My recommendation to her was to slow down and pay attention to say every word clearly before jumping into more artistic manipulations of the language. Surely it was frustrating to her, feeling she was moving back to a more primitive use of english. But she's also been improving her ability to be understood by other speakers.

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