Rodevra Republic

This advertisement reminded me of my days with Lloyd’s Register, a blue-blooded British company with a global presence. Naturally, it had people working from across the world, and the common language was, of course, English.

In our interactions with colleagues from different countries, we heard many ‘flavours’ of English. From the Japanese to the Dutch, the Greek, French, Chinese and Korean, during our international conference calls all these accents came through as a heady mix.

There was never a question of whose English was right. We were far more interested in what people had to say. In fact, clarity mattered far more than accent.

The British managers too never imposed their English. Instead, they encouraged a code of simple English, recognising that there would be people from many nationalities for whom English was a second language. The aim was not elegance of language, but clarity of communication.

But then, what is the right English?

English today is spoken by millions across the world, yet historically the British and American accents came to be treated as the “standard”, largely because those countries carried global influence. When accent discrimination occurs, it is rarely about language. It is usually about power and prestige.

This is why the British accent is often equated with correct English, the American accent with acceptable English, while Asian or African accents are sometimes dismissed as “broken” English. Linguistically, however, this assumption is completely false.

An accent is simply the sound pattern created when a speaker’s native language interacts with another language. There is no mistake in an accent. It is evidence of where you come from. It carries geography, culture, identity and history. To erase accents would be to erase the diversity of the world itself.

Every speaker has an accent. Even within Britain there are many accents, Yorkshire, Scottish, Cockney, Welsh and several others. So the question is not who has an accent. The real question is whose accent society chooses to respect.

Today the majority of English speakers in the world are non-native speakers. It would not be incorrect to say that English no longer belongs only to England. Countries like India, the Philippines, Nigeria and Singapore have millions of fluent English speakers. English has therefore become a global language, and naturally it has developed many forms.

In fact, scholars point out that the English spoken by William Shakespeare himself sounded very different from the modern British accent that many today consider the “standard”.

There is also a cultural irony that is very relevant to India, and is reflected in the advertisement. People often mock someone with a strong local accent. Yet the same people will happily admire a French accent, an Italian accent or a British accent, even though all of them are equally “non-neutral”. The ridicule, therefore, is not linguistic. It is social hierarchy disguised as language criticism.

The point the Axis Bank advertisement makes touches exactly this truth. India has 22 official languages, hundreds of dialects and thousands of speech patterns. Naturally we have many English accents. Yet we sometimes treat accent as a sign of intelligence, education or cultural superiority, which it absolutely is not. It is merely a linguistic fingerprint.

Ironically, English itself is a language born of many accents, many invasions and many borrowings. It carries Viking winds, Norman courts, Latin scholars and village dialects within it.

So when someone speaks English with an accent, they are not distorting the language.

They are simply adding one more colour, one more flavour to it.

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