Perceptions on accents divide Americans

Pretend, for a moment, that you have just been introduced to a person by a friend. The person shakes your hand as he says "Hello."  And instantly, you know from this person's accent that he is from a different region of the country or another country entirely.

You place the person as Bostonian, Texan, Southern or English all because of the accent he has.

In a Sept. 24 New York Times story, some Arizona teacher evaluators thought this was a bad thing.

In the story "In Arizona, Complaints That an Accent Can Hinder a Teacher's Career," the reporter states teachers, especially Hispanic teachers, where written up for accent-based mispronunciations—such as "leeves here" for "lives here."

This is contrary to what Andrew LeFevre, a spokesman for the Arizona State Department of Education said in the article: "It was a repeated patter of misuse of the language (English) or mispronunciation of the language that [monitors and evaluators] were looking for."

The good thing is that Arizona is reconsidering and reforming this policy, but the problem is that accents are seen as negative.

Bias against accents is even more problematic, such as is schools where both the teachers and the students are negatively impacted.

If accents where a determinant of good teaching, then teachers would only be able to work in areas with similar accents.  Regardless of qualifications and ability, a teacher with a Midwestern accent could not be a good teacher in the South, based solely on an accent in such a case.

This is unethical bias, which can result in—and did result in the case of the teacher at the focus of the New York Times article—lawsuits against school corporations and state education departments based on civil liberties.

Once students leave high school, they are dropped either into the lap of jobs or colleges, where not everyone speaks with the same accent, meaning students exposed to one accent will have difficulty in understanding students from across the country and international students.

This limited world view could lead to a student discriminating against others based on something as unimportant as whether or not a person says "toMAYtoe" or "toMAHto." But much more likely, it would lead to issues where a student had a breakdown in communication with a co-worker, an employer, or a collegiate peer.

Such actions only continue to foster the stereotypes we attached to accents. All people with Southern accents are stupid, all people with Texan accents have guns and are afraid to use them and all people with Mexican accents are illegal aliens.

If we let our governmental officials to allow such actions, we are not abiding by America's equality, allowing us to degrade others just because they say "equality" slightly differently than we do.