This issue of accent and how it is used to discriminate

I come from a country where there are over 40 ethnic groups. This is not including the Indians, Arabs and Europeans who have settled in the country. English is the official language and the language of instructions in schools from Kindergarten, while Swahili is the national language.

The English spoken in my country is more British oriented since we were once a colony of Britain. The various ethnic groups all speak different “mother tongues” or languages together with English and Swahili. The average person therefore speaks at least three languages. It follows that most people have different accents when speaking another language outside their mother tongue. Some may have problems with letter “h” when it is together with “s” and may pronounce “she” as “see”. Others may have problems with letter “r” and “l” and pronounce “light” as “right” and “right” as “light” among such.

This off course is based on the fact that their tongue does a trick on them based on the first language they acquired or perhaps they think in their mother tongue hence the problem with how letters are received in the brain. We jokingly make fun of each others accents in my country of birth because the accents reveal what ethnic group one comes from. Not everyone however has this issue of mother tongue accent. Some people will speak without the common accent of their ethnicity in particular those born in the cities. They do not however speak English like the English because they are not English.

Before I came to the United States of America I never thought much about my accent when it came to speaking English. I don’t have the common accent attributed to people from my ethnic background and I learnt to speak English early on as a child.  But that does not mean I speak like an English person by the very fact that I am not English. I also speak my mother tongue and three other languages. You can imagine my surprise when I came to America and I realized that even though I spoke good English some people could not “understand” me. I realized quickly enough that British English is very different from American English.

Words are pronounced and spelled differently and some words are just not used in America. I once told someone that something would be ready in a fortnight and they looked at me as if I was speaking a different language. A fortnight for those who don’t know is two weeks. I also discovered certain words are spelt missing certain vowels in American English. These are words like color and harbor which are spelt without a “u” after the “o”.

Read more: http://www.bukisa.com/articles/216628_how-your-accents-can-be-used-to-demean-you