Accents and Correctness

It's pretty funny. Schools in India are now beginning to focus on speaking English with a correct American accent. 🤦.

I love the American people as much as I love everyone else 🙂, but look here, let me ask you a question:

A knowledge of English certainly helps in communicating with the world at large today and I'm quite happy with it being the medium of instruction in schools and colleges in our country. But: Have you ever noticed that each culture, each part of the world, just accents words their own way? Stephen Hawking from the UK, Bob Marley from Jamaica, Janis Joplin from the USA, Eloisa M Rodriguez from Honduras, and that Sikh fauji from Punjab all have different accents. And they're all cool. This has nothing to do with correctness of the English language itself. [The French have, of course, established a whole different league altogether 😁.]

There is no "one correct English accent". Just speak the language correctly. There's a difference. Understand this.

And all those schools who are not hiring English teachers with an excellent knowledge of the language just because they don't speak the American way: This is not ok! This is India, not America. You cannot discriminate on the basis of accents. This is outright unethical. We can't bring up the next generation trying to mold itself after another society all the way down to how we talk! And we can't hurt someone's livelihood just because they don't speak like foreigners. What are we? Idiots?