While browsing through some videos, I accidentally stumbled upon a video in which a Bollywood actress indirectly made fun of another actress’ English accent. This small instance brought on many unpleasant memories that I have faced myself. Coming from a very small town of Bihar and being a byproduct of Hindi medium government school, I have always been at the end of such ridicule. Such arrogance is easily available everywhere we go. People make fun of your accent and sometime to an extent that they kept on asking me to pronounce a particular alphabet, just to laugh on my accent. But let me be clear on one point, not all people do that. A person who is intelligent and self-assured does not look into such trivialities. Only the people whose only achievement is to go to an English medium school, are compelled to show their language/accent superiority to hide their own insecurity and shortcomings.
A Bihari regardless of his/her intelligence or achievements
are always subjected to such ridicules for their accent (either English or
Hindi). Don’t all these concepts reek of colonial mentality to you? Who decides
on which accent is better or superior? Take an example of Hindi, there are
millions of speakers for Hindi and it has hundreds of variants and accents. Why
do you think the accent you have is better than anyone else? Similarly, there
are millions of English speaker and accent differs for region to region and country
to country. A conceited private schooled person from Delhi might find accent of
a Bihari repugnant. But what about if the same person is subjected to some conceited
foreigners from Boston (US), they will find their oriental accent repugnant.
Same will be true when person from Boston meet a person from Oxford (UK). How
can you ridicule any person thinking you are better than them, just because an
accent?
Language is a skill. A skill every person should strive to acquire.
I love different languages and one of my greatest ambition is to learn as many
as of them. One can learn as many as language, but they will always be their 2nd,
3rd, ….. language never be the first one. Its nice if you can speak a fluent English (or
any other language) with superb accent. But that doesn’t make you superior while
others inferior. As long as one can communicate and make themselves understood
to others, that person is proficient in that language. Who care how they speak
it, as long as you understand them. Knowing a language itself is an achievement
and that’s what we strive to do. We don’t have to become a singer or linguist,
we just need to communicate and for that it is ok even if its heavily accented.
