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A few weeks ago, I mentioned in my column that
prospective Filipino call-center agents are trained to acquire a
neutral American English accent to communicate more effectively with
the North Americans they have to deal with over the phone (“A
great accent alone isn’t great English,” July 12, 2008). In
response, a US-based reader, Celso Madarang, wrote me saying that he
couldn’t imagine how a school or a seminar can teach people a
particular English accent.
He might find it surprising, I
told Celso, that there are now a good number of language institutes
in the Philippines that specialize in teaching people how to acquire
a desired English accent. In addition, most of the call centers
themselves have in-house accent training departments that drill
prospective call-center agents on the English accent the call center
specifically needs.
In fact, my eldest son underwent
one such English accent training the other year when, on a lark, he
tried applying for a call-center job. He got accepted and worked as
a call-center agent for two months. He eventually quit because as a
working student, he couldn’t take the “graveyard shift” from
10:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m. anymore, but the accent training certainly gave
him a very pleasant American English accent. It’s now serving him
very well in his job as part-time instructor in computer basics and
web programming in a leading Metro Manila computer school.
I also told Celso that lately, I
had also been pleasantly surprised to learn that American English
accent training is being taught in an even more massive way in
India, particularly in Bangalore. India, having been colonized by
the British for almost 200 years, has a strong English-language
heritage like the Philippines, but most people in India happen to
have such a pronounced natural singsong accent when speaking in
English. That accent therefore needs to be neutralized for
globalization’s sake, and I told Celso that I had come across a
detailed account of how this is being done. This was in an early
chapter of Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book on globalization,
The World is Flat, that I am currently reading.
Friedman recounts that
English-language trainers drill the Indians with stupendously
complicated English-language phonetic drills. Among them is this
mean tongue-twister: “Thirty little turtles in a bottle of bottled
water. A bottle of bottled water held thirty little turtles. It
didn’t matter that each turtle has to rattle a metal ladle in
order to get a little bit of noodles.” Indeed, when I tried
enunciating this particular phonetic drill, my tongue got so
hopelessly tangled inside my mouth. I suppose, though, that the
drills are doing wonders to the Indians, for I understand there are
now tens of thousands of them serving as call-center agents for
North American target markets.
These thoughts that I shared with
Celso drew the following rejoinder from him:
“About my interest in how
someone develops accents, I want to tell you about an experience I
had when I was in Sydney, Australia, in 1966 when the ship I was
with was on rest and recreation after a three-month tour in the
Tongkin Gulf war zone in Vietnam. For the two weeks that the ship
was in port, it was designated as a visiting ship. This meant that
civilians could come on board to mingle with the crew and see how
the sailors lived; our living quarters, of course, were
understandably off-limits.
“Anyway, a group of Filipinos
came on board one day. We got into conversations that alternated
between Tagalog and English. In one of those conversations, a female
Australian among the ship’s crew told me that I had ‘such a
beautiful accent.’ Now, that remark really surprised me because I
knew I didn’t have an accent; indeed, it was she and the others
who had an accent—an Australian one—that they seemed not to be
even aware they had. Isn’t that funny?”
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