By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
When my family moved out of India a decade ago, I landed in an American school in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It was a bizarre reality to comprehend: students with MacBooks connecting to Apple TV projectors in air-conditioned classrooms, while rickshaw drivers cycled passengers through the humid heat outside. My classmates talked about their first-class flights to the US, while many in the city struggled to afford a daily meal. Meanwhile, I was a 14-year-old with tear-stained journal entries, trying to make sense of where I belonged. Hating myself for not sounding right, I was suddenly confronted with the reality that, regardless of English being my first language, I would never be considered a native speaker as long as I held on to my Indian accent.
In journal entries from that year, I reflected on all that stood out to me. In one entry, I wrote about my friend, who had a more pronounced Indian accent, being constantly dismissed as less capable. At the same time, I was praised for similar ideas — once I had softened my sounds enough for the American standard. Later, living in Shanghai, I would witness servers being confused by my mother’s accent as she asked for water. Even today, when my partner orders coffee, baristas instinctively glance at me to repeat it in the presumed proper accent.
What felt shameful at 14 was never about me at all; it was about linguistic imperialism.
Accent-based discrimination is not harmless, it shapes who gets heard, hired, and respected. In classrooms, students speaking non-native varieties of English are treated as less intelligent or even suspected of plagiarism. In workplaces, candidates are judged not by their skills but by how professional they sound. In daily life, speakers of World Englishes face constant microaggressions: jokes, corrections, backhanded compliments, and the “your English is so good!” The message is clear: a person’s voice is only valued when it adheres to colonial standards.
At the airport immigration checkpoint, I watched an officer berate an East Asian woman because of how she spoke. Just last week, as I sat on the bus going down the 20 route, I heard slurs shouted at strangers whose accents marked them as foreign. These moments repeat the same story: the problem isn’t comprehension but prejudice rooted in the myth of a neutral English accent. We are told there is a correct way to speak English, but this usually means white, middle-class American or British speech. They reflect how institutions, from schools to immigration counters to algorithms, reproduce the same prejudice. And it forces third-culture kids like me to self-police our voices and mannerisms, to give up our cultural identities if we want to be taken seriously.
The reality is that English is a living language, with varieties evolving across the world. Their voices are not broken versions of English but legitimate expressions of it. Today, more people speak English as a second (or third, or fourth) language than as their mother tongue. Each foreign accent carries a rich story — of migration, colonization, trade, exile, resilience. My auntie’s voice, misunderstood by Siri or Alexa, is not a failure to speak correctly but a reminder of the paths she has walked and the worlds she straddles. Celebrating voices like hers is not just a matter of courtesy; it is an act of resistance against neocolonialism.
If we continue to measure people against a fabricated neutral accent, we erase the richness of our shared language and reinforce the hierarchies that keep racialized speakers at the margins.
But if we embrace the diversity of Englishes as they are actually spoken, we can begin to dismantle the idea that belonging is conditional upon sounding white, Western, or elite. I wish I could hug my 14-year-old self and tell her accents are not mistakes to be corrected or flaws to be erased. They are living histories, and it is high time we give them the respect and admiration they deserve.
