Accent as a Labour Control Mechanism

In their qualitative study dealing with the accent discrimination experienced by African migrants in the Canadian labour market, Creese and Kambere (Reference Creese and Kambere2003) note how “Canadian English,” especially its auditory form, functions as a figurative border that blocks access to meaningful employment. That is, since they do not physically and aurally match a “Canadian accent,” an ideological construction reflecting the whiteness of Canada, these migrants are deemed unqualified for public-facing occupations such as teaching, which require this accent. While this border allows white European migrants entry to particular professions due to their closer proximity to an imagined Canadian English, it becomes a tool to reinforce hiring practices based on anti-Black racism.

The way that accent acts as a border limiting employment opportunities speaks to how it can be used as a type of labour control mechanism, which sorts desirable and undesirable workers on the basis of race. But what makes accent a seemingly acceptable sorting mechanism is its use as an indicator of professional competence. For instance, Lorente (Reference Lorente2018) notes how Canadian domestic/maid agencies often use accent to reinforce colonial stereotypes about the allegedly inherent traits of different migrant domestic workers. Whereas the accents of European workers are perceived as signs of “professionalism,” those of workers from the Philippines index their supposed lack of skill, intellect, and confidence, thus making them unsuitable for communicative work. Indeed, while agencies market the ideal nanny as European due to their “innate” ability to properly care for and interact with children, they promote Filipinos as suitable for housekeeping, a solitary type of work perceived as “low-skilled.”

This example of maid agencies also highlights that accent as a labour control mechanism not only bars certain migrants from specific occupations but also helps to ensure that they provide needed labour elsewhere. With countries like Canada embracing neoliberal economic agendas that depend on precarious, low-paid work, racially minoritised migrants—and particularly migrant women—take up such work because their desperation for employment makes them willing to accept poor working conditions (Krysa et al., Reference Krysa, Paludi and Mills2019). In terms of accent, then, it becomes a contributor to this desperation for work. When their accents prevent them from securing high-status and well-paying positions, racially minoritised migrants will resort to pursuing jobs that, although unstable and low paying, do not scrutinize the way they sound.

While accent is certainly not the only factor leading to the racial stratification of labour (see the penultimate section), it is important to emphasize that even the idea of an accent can be a barrier to employment. Take, for example, Oreopoulos’ (2011) study on why skilled migrants struggle to find work in a major metropolitan area in Canada. After sending close to 13,000 fake résumés to a little over three thousand career postings requiring an undergraduate degree, Oreopoulos noted how résumés that contained (South) Asian names generally received fewer callbacks than those with Anglo names, even when they satisfied the technical requirements for the job. In follow-up interviews with employers, Oreopoulos found that they deemed an Indian or Chinese name to be an indicator of a potentially unintelligible accent, which they believed could prove bothersome in customer-facing occupations. Therefore, even when racially minoritised jobseekers possess the desired credentials for work, the way they are imagined to sound decreases their employability.

Training Accent, Upholding Colonial Hierarchies

As seen above, accent reinforces racism in labour migration by facilitating the racial stratification and segregation of labour. Another aspect of its reinforcement concerns sustaining racialised power relations between workers and customers. One notorious example is the context of transnational call centre work, where the physical bodies of migrant workers do not migrate but rather their labour does (Aneesh, Reference Aneesh2015). As sites of telephonic service work in which agents engage in activities ranging from helping customers with banking transactions to telemarketing, transnational call centres are typically located in former colonies of empires, whereby workers use the same language as their former colonizers to accomplish job tasks (Inoue, Reference Inoue2018). In the case of Indian call centres, for instance, agents are required to converse in English with British and other English-speaking callers from the Global North.

Beyond the need to use a colonial language, the neocolonial relationship between call centre workers and their callers is reinforced through deficit perspectives about the accents of the former. Turning to the Indian context once again, even though desirable agents are graduates of English-medium schools established through British colonial policies, which is a signal that they speak an elite type of English, this English is nevertheless perceived as lacking intelligibility when juxtaposed with varieties of English from the Global North (Mirchandani, Reference Mirchandani2012). As a result, agents are formally trained to “neutralise” features of their accents, which, more often than not, entails emulating British and/or U.S. varieties of English in particular (Aneesh, Reference Aneesh2015; Mirchandani, Reference Mirchandani2012). Accent neutralisation training is tied to the neutralisation of identity. In other words, such training indexes “sounding Indian” as professionally undesirable and, furthermore, must be masked by “orally civilising” oneself through the adoption of western ways of speaking.

What is also noteworthy is how the Indian call centre agent must not only develop a “neutral accent” but also one that expresses the right emotions. For example, drawing on interviews with agents in New Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune, Mirchandani (Reference Mirchandani2012) details how these workers are trained to develop a type of intonation or general tone of voice that conveys a caring, deferential persona. One purpose of this “feminised” accent is to highlight the worker's deference to the customer, which aligns with the general expectation about customer service representatives’ behaviour and also reinforces the neocolonial idea that Indians must be subservient to those in the Global North. However, another of its functions is to protect the Indian economy. As Mirchandani explains, this vocal servitude is perceived in terms of nation building because caring service ensures more labour outsourcing to India, which in turn promotes national economic growth. That is, multinational corporations are more willing to rely on Indian call centres if they know that local agents are dedicated to pleasing customers in spite of receiving lower wages than their western counterparts, facing racist abuse from callers, and so on. At least on the microlevel, then, this type of accent training ensures that: (a) call centre workers keep their jobs, and (b) call centre employers have access to a submissive, inexpensive workforce.

Accent as a Credential and Distraction

It is important to note that accent neutralisation training, as seen with call centre workers, has become an entire industry itself. Better known as “accent reduction” and taking the form of online or in-person classes offered by private trainers and speech language pathologists, this industry has marketed itself as a means to improve migrants’ career prospects in the English-speaking Global North. If, as discussed earlier, the accented Englishes of migrant jobseekers act as barriers to employment, the purpose of accent reduction is to remove these auditory barriers by reducing their “foreignness” (Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2009; Ramjattan, Reference Ramjattan2019). Beyond the assumption that accents can be “reduced” in the first place, one issue with a “reduced” accent is that, unless one wants to become a call centre agent, for instance, it does not necessarily enhance one's employability. This is because changing one's accent does not eliminate institutional obstacles that particularly hurt racially minoritised migrants in the job market.

For example, in addition to racist understandings of their accents as described before, migrant jobseekers from the Global South find it difficult to secure high-status, well-paying employment due to the nonrecognition of their prior work experience and educational credentials, both of which are deemed “substandard” in Global North contexts by various regulatory bodies and employers (e.g., Ameeriar, Reference Ameeriar2017). Therefore, for an Indian doctor who is unable to practice medicine in the U.S. because of their “inferior” medical degree or a Nigerian engineer who cannot find work in their field due to a lack of Canadian work experience, a reduced accent cannot remedy these institutionalised obstructions to employment.Footnote ¹ What the idea of a reduced accent actually does is distract jobseekers from institutional racism by making them believe that their employability is in their complete vocal control (Ramjattan, Reference Ramjattan2019).

Understanding why accent reduction remains a distraction from racism involves noting the political economy in which it is situated. In fact, the rise of accent reduction programmes signals how neoliberal governments continue to shift the responsibility of migrant employment training to a series of private organisations, which view un(der)employment as caused by the linguistic and cultural “failings” of migrants rather than policy failures (Ameeriar, Reference Ameeriar2017; Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2009). Since they are unregulated and have no institutional power to enact change, for accent-reduction providers making prospective clients insecure about their accents is actually more lucrative than helping them to fight against the racism that truly hinders their job prospects. And it is indeed lucrative given that accent reduction is regarded as a service meant for migrants in elite professions, who have the financial means to further their careers in the Global North (Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2009). This highlights that a reduced accent is only a credential for those who can afford it.