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Of all the things we can complain about Quantico , the new American television thriller series with Priyanka Chopra in the lead — bad acting, cliched dialogues, choppy editing — we pick on Chopra’s accent. And this shows how obsessed we are with the way people speak.
Our accent is an important part of our identity and can reveal a lot about us. In 2008, a group of researchers asked people in the Scottish-English border how they would vote if there were to be a referendum for Scottish independence. >They found a correlation between those with an accent and those who said yes for independence . The more you identify with or cherish your accent, the stronger your accent. So, it’s little wonder that when we see someone put on a foreign accent, we get uncomfortable. We call them inauthentic.
But people change accents to suit the audience for good reasons — to break barriers, to build a rapport and to be more persuasive. Having a foreign accent can hurt too. In a >study in the United States, about 140 students were asked to listen to sales pitches by two sets of people for VCR (yes, back in those days). One set used the standard American accent and the other spoke English with a Greek accent. Students rated salesmen with an American accent to be friendlier, more competent and credible.
More recently, researchers from University of Chicago read out statements such as "a giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can" and "ants don't sleep" in different accents to their participants — and asked them to rate them on how likely they were to be true. The American accent topped. The heavier the other accents, the less credible they were rated. "The accent makes it harder for people to understand what the non-native speaker is saying. They misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements," one of the researchers >said .
Politicians knew it all the time. Margaret Thatcher had >to give her Lincolnshire accent up for broader appeal. Barack Obama could effortlessly switch from one style to another depending on his audience. As David Remnick writes in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, “He was adept at pitching his cadences one way in black churches, another way at a P.T.A. meeting downstate, and yet another at a living-room gathering in Hyde Park or the near North Side.”
What applies to speech, applies to writing too. We don’t write the same way to everyone. Our style changes depending on whether we are sending a mail to our boss, a client or a friend. Technology will only add to the variety.
Earlier this year, a startup called >Crystal launched a service that would build personality profiles of people using information gleaned from Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. — based on which it would advise you to change your writing style. I looked up the profiles of some people I knew, and I was amazed by what it could tell about a person’s communication preferences based on public data.
Knowing our natural communication style — and that of others — is key to performing better; and not being aware of it can be a career-breaker. Peter Drucker gives an example of what happens when we don’t pay attention to that. Lyndon Johnson, Drucker wrote, “destroyed his presidency, in large measure, by not knowing that he was a listener. His predecessor, John Kennedy, was a reader who had assembled a brilliant group of writers as his assistants, making sure that they wrote to him before discussing their memos in person. Johnson kept these people on his staff — and they kept on writing. He never, apparently, understood one word of what they wrote. Yet, as a senator, Johnson had been superb; for parliamentarians have to be, above all, listeners.”
We know all these to be true. After all, we don’t talk to our colleagues the same way we talk to a five-year-old kid. Yet, we tend to raise our eyebrows when we see our friends switch accents. We say, it’s not authentic. But, it might be that our idea of authenticity is wrong. For long, I used to think coffee was an authentic south Indian drink — till I learned south India didn’t even have coffee till the 17th Century. Again, I thought idli was an authentic south Indian dish — but then, it might have come through an Arabian influence, or from Indonesia. Even pallanguzhi , that traditional game I played with my grandmother during summer holidays in my boyhood, probably originated in Africa.
Often, the best things happen in our lives not when the doors are closed, but when they are open; not when we are in an echo chamber, but when there are several voices — questioning and debating, discarding some ideas, and assimilating others; when people take effort to understand and be understood. In the process, there will be conflicts and contradictions. That’s part of the game.
As Walt Whitman wrote:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes.
