Srishti Sangwan

By Srishti Sangwan | Reality Check

Let’s begin with a simple question: Have you ever held your tongue because you feared your accent might betray you?

If yes, welcome to the club. If not, welcome to the reality you might’ve never noticed.

In India, where linguistic diversity is richer than most nations can dream of, accents should be badges of identity. Instead, they’re treated like defects — flaws to be “neutralized,” corrected, or, worse, ridiculed.

🔇 The Silent Classroom

As an English language teacher, I’ve watched brilliant students retreat into silence, not because they lack thoughts, but because they don’t sound “polished.” They hesitate not over what to say, but how they might sound. Their accents — rooted in regional languages, shaped by mother tongues — become the very barriers to their participation.

We don’t talk enough about accent anxiety, especially among learners from rural or non-elite backgrounds. While schools may pretend to celebrate multilingualism, the unspoken hierarchy is clear: the closer your English sounds to BBC or CNN, the more legitimate your voice is.

💬 Accent ≠ Intelligence

Here’s the hard truth: Fluency is not a measure of intelligence. Neither is accent.

Yet, we continue to equate a “neutral” or “American” accent with confidence, education, and even employability.

Job interviews, college group discussions, public speaking competitions — all become stages where language isn’t just about expression, but performance. A performance rigged in favour of those raised in English-medium urban bubbles.

🪞Colonial Ghosts Still Haunt Us

Why do we feel this shame? Because somewhere, the ghost of colonial hangover still whispers: “You’re only as smart as your English sounds.”

Accent discrimination is a symptom of deeper cultural insecurities, rooted in classism, casteism, and colonialism. It’s not about clarity; it’s about control. About who gets to dominate the conversation, and who is always asked to “repeat that, please.”

🔄 The “Neutral Accent” Myth

Let’s also bust the myth of the neutral accent.

There’s no such thing. An “accent” is just the way someone else speaks — different from yours. What’s considered “neutral” is simply familiar to power. We call American or British English “neutral” only because those regions dominate media, business, and global education.

So the pressure to erase your Bhojpuri, Malayalam, Marwari, or Haryanvi influence isn’t a linguistic demand — it’s a social obedience test.

🧭 What Needs to Change?

1. Teachers must stop correcting accents unless clarity is genuinely compromised.

2. Employers need to be called out for hiring based on spoken polish rather than substance.

3. Learners should be encouraged to own their voice — not mimic another’s.

4. And as a society, we need to unlearn this internalized shame around sounding “local.”

🧠 Final Reality Check

Your accent carries your history, your geography, your people. To ask someone to change their accent is to ask them to hide who they are. And that, my friends, is the real crime.

Have a story of being judged for your accent? Or a moment where you reclaimed it with pride? Drop a comment or write to me. Let’s build a world where voices don’t need filters to be heard.