Why the way we sound still determines who is heard

It’s a scene that stays with you as an educator: sitting over an answer script that radiates creativity, only to find that the voice behind the pen is still suppressed by a profound, self-imposed silence. I recently evaluated a student’s answer script whose written arguments were sophisticated and persuasive. However, when it came to oral presentations, she faltered, not due to lack of knowledge, but because of a paralysing fear that her mother-tongue influence made her accent inappropriate for the academic stage. Obviously, her rural background with mother tongue as language of instruction did not weaken cognitive skills. Instead, what it has stifled is English communication skills.

Sometimes students’ anxiety makes you ponder the hidden cost of correction. Observing oral presentations, I sometimes bump up against a rule we seldom talk about: that authority in public life isn’t just about what you say, but how you sound while saying it.

Who is allowed to be heard

Behind the tidy diagrams of speech sounds lies a puritan fantasy: that English has a correct sound, and that any deviation from it, signals a deficiency in education, intelligence, and even character. Once phonetic norms begin to determine a person’s presentability, employability, sophistication, and trust, accent privilege dons the mask of competence and patrols the borders of who is allowed to be heard. What often passes as clarity turns out to be little more than elite comfort.

Curiously enough, during and after India’s 1983 World Cup victory at Lord’s, Kapil Dev spoke comfortably in unpolished Indian English. In spaces saturated with colonial prestige, he did not slide into accent mimicry, even at a time when Indian captains were expected to sound Oxford-adjacent to be taken seriously. He did not announce this as resistance. He simply spoke unmindful of the fact that English fluency and accent were quietly linked to thinking cricket.

Accent discrimination

A mere purist approach to phonetics rests on a rather comforting belief that human speech sounds can be easily classified, transcribed, and reproduced through a universal system. The study of English pronunciation inherits a deeper assumption from Western scientific rationality itself: that sound can be neatly coded, stabilised, and disciplined.

For many language trainers, the International Phonetic Alphabet is a reassurance that speech can be neatly mapped and corrected whenever deviations occur. For sound engineers, speech therapists, and certain technical tasks, this works well. But when this logic migrates into classrooms, corporate training programmes, and hiring practices, it becomes something else entirely. The living voice is recast as a defect to be fixed or rejected. What begins as description quietly becomes prescription.

Nowhere is this clearer than in accent-training programmes. Across India, the Philippines, and Africa, call-centre workers are taught to smoothen their voices into something vaguely American or British. Regional textures are scrubbed away. Rolled /r/s are softened, retroflex consonants flattened, and syllable timing replaced with stress timing. The message is unmistakable: your voice becomes employable only after it stops sounding like where you come from.

Rosina Lippi-Green, in English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (1997), names this practice for what it is: accent discrimination. She demonstrates how film, television, and corporate training cultures systematically associate non-standard accents with villainy, stupidity, servility, or comic relief, while standard accents are coded as intelligence, authority, and trustworthiness. Crucially, Lippi-Green shows that these associations are learned early, long before speakers encounter phonetic charts or grammar rules. By the time pronunciation is formally taught, the moral hierarchy of accents is already in place, making “correction” appear natural, helpful, and inevitable.

Linguistic capital

Human speech does not arrive as discrete units. It stretches, slips, and hesitates as emotion reshapes sound in real time. Vowels bleed into one another. Consonants soften or harden depending on context. Intonation curves bend mid-word. When emotion reshapes articulation in real time, what a mechanical phonetic transcription does is freeze this movement into static symbols and then mistakes the freeze-frame for the flow. It is like photographing a river and claiming you now understand its current.

Yet, we often treat language as a neutral tool, a cognitive machine, as Noam Chomsky might frame it, that simply generates sentences. But this technical view ignores how language actually lives in the world. It operates within what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called linguistic capital linked to markets of power.

Meaning can arise outside the strictures of perfect grammar when it is socially negotiated. In other words, speech does not carry authority by virtue of its clarity alone, but through its ‘linguistic capital’, the legitimacy granted by institutions. In this light, what we call ‘good language’ is rarely about efficiency; it is simply the dialect of those already authorised to speak.

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion reveals that Professor Higgins’s training of Eliza Doolittle is never merely about speech; it is a lesson in class mobility through vocal discipline. The play exposes how sounding “correct” functions as an entry ticket into respectability, while leaving social power itself untouched.

To train the voice, Shaw suggests, is ultimately to train the body into a social order rather than to improve communication. What is at stake is not pronunciation but permission to be heard, believed, and admitted. In this sense, the human voice cannot be reduced to speech sounds alone. It is lodged in lungs that tire, in throats shaped by geography, labour, illness, and age.

Verbal hygiene

Deborah Cameron develops the idea of “verbal hygiene” to describe society’s obsessive urge to regulate, clean up, and moralise language in the name of clarity and correctness. Cameron shows that this impulse often functions as a barrier to communication rather than a facilitator of it. By shifting attention from meaning, context, and intention to accent, grammar, and tone, verbal hygiene turns communication into a test of conformity.

This matters because pronunciation has consequences. It affects who gets hired, who gets trusted, and who is taken seriously, especially when immigrants are told their accents undermine professionalism. Sometimes, job applicants are rejected under the assumption that clients might “feel uncomfortable.” In classrooms, students are penalised for mother-tongue influence. News anchors are retrained until their regions disappear from their vowels.

Developing communicative agency

The real question is not whether someone’s English is correct. It is why we are so invested in correcting it and whose comfort that correction serves. Instead of marking pronunciation “errors,” language trainers can ask students to analyse how meaning is carried in real speech: through intonation, pacing, pauses, emphasis, and interactional cues. Students listen to the same idea expressed in different accents and discuss the changes it brings to interpretation and those it does not. Assessment shifts from “How close is this to a standard accent?” to “Was the message understood, negotiated, and responded to?” This trains students not to erase their voices, but to develop communicative agency: the ability to adapt strategically without surrendering identity.

In doing so, pedagogy stops sanding down voices and begins building bridges of shared understanding. Chinua Achebe famously argued that African writers should not reject English but should fashion a “new English” capable of carrying the weight of the African experience.

True confidence in speaking begins by dismantling the myth of a single “correct” sound. When we stop treating our natural accents as errors in need of correction, we free our cognitive resources from the anxiety of mimicry and redirect them toward the substance of our ideas. To speak with authority is not to sound British or American speech, but to speak with the full weight of one’s own history and experience, trusting that clarity arises from intent and meaning, not from the flattening of one’s vowels.

(Sudeesh K is a freelance writer and social commentator. He is a faculty in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Yeshwanthpur Campus, Bangalore)

(Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.)