Accent discrimination

Significance: Under US law, employers can discriminate against applicants for employment whom they believe to have accents that might impede normal business activities. Persons whose primary language is not English, therefore, may have to shed their accents to qualify for jobs that involve speaking with the general public.

A standard American English accent is commonly heard in schools and spoken on radio and television, but there are regional variations, especially in Hawaii, New England, and the southern states. Immigrants who learn English tend to speak the new language in accordance with the pronunciation and intonation patterns of their native tongues, which means that those unfamiliar with their accents may not understand them completely and may require repetition or clarification. At issue, therefore, is whether an employer can reject someone with an unfamiliar accent without discriminating against that person on the basis of ethnic group membership.

The Nature of Accents

Vocal muscles develop so early in life that it is difficult for an adult native speaker of one language to learn a second language without carrying forward the accents of the primary language. In the United States, composed as it is of immigrants and their descendants, English is spoken with many accents. Some schools can teach adult immigrants to speak without a noticeable accent, but these classes are expensive and not always accessible to newcomers, whose time is often preoccupied with material adjustments to life in a new country.

The United States does not have an official standard of speech, although the informal standard is the American English accent spoken by newscasters at the national level. Accent is the result of speech patterns that differ from region to region or country to country. For example, Cuban speakers of Spanish speak more quickly than do Mexican speakers of Spanish. Variations also exist within countries. Because one characteristic of an ethnic group in the United States is the manner in which its members pronounce English, ethnic group membership is often identified by or associated with accent. It is this connection that makes accent a key issue of racial and ethnic relations.

Antidiscrimination Legislation

In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress banned discrimination on the basis of a person’s color, ethnicity, or race in education, employment, government services, public accommodations, public facilities, and voting. The law regarding employment discrimination prohibits not only obvious discrimination, such as signs that say Blacks Need Not Apply, but also the use of neutral-sounding job qualifications that systematically place minorities or women at a disadvantage unless these qualifications are vital for the performance of the job. To refuse to hire a member of a minority group on the pretext that the person’s accent is too strong, therefore, might violate the law unless the lack of a noticeable accent can be demonstrated to be necessary for the performance of the job.

Litigation on Language Discrimination

In Carino v. University of Oklahoma Board of Regents (1984), the federal appeals court ruled that Donaciano Carino, a dental laboratory supervisor, could not be terminated from his position because of his Filipino accent as his job did not involve communication with the general public.

In 1982, Manuel Fragante, a Filipino immigrant with a noticeable accent, applied for the position of applications intake clerk in the motor vehicle licensing division of the City and County of Honolulu. The hiring officer turned him down, claiming that Fragante’s accent would make communication difficult; Fragrante’s lawyer argued that his client’s accent was fully understandable and therefore was a mere pretext for a Japanese American supervisor to discriminate against a Filipino. In Fragante v. City and County of Honolulu (1987), the federal district court in Honolulu upheld the right of the employer to refuse to hire someone with a “heavy accent,” ruling that Fragante’s accent was not an immutable part of his Filipino ethnic group membership. The court of appeals upheld the ruling in 1989, and the Supreme Court refused to review the case in 1990.

In 1985–1986, James Kahakua and George Kitazaki applied for the position of weather-service broadcaster. Although they were native speakers of English, they spoke “pidgin” English, a decided accent local to Hawaii. The position involved broadcasting marine weather reports to ships at sea, and most of the vessels in the area were based in California, so the National Weather Service felt justified in refusing to hire the two men because their accents might prevent a clear transmission of information. Kahakua and Kitazaki sued the weather service for discrimination but lost.

Impact on Public Policy

In the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress did not explicitly forbid discrimination on the basis of accent. Clarity in speech is recognized as a bona fide occupational qualification for jobs involving considerable oral communication with the general public. The standards for determining whether an accent is unclear tend to be subjective, so the issue may be resolved by use of the Test of Spoken English, a standardized test administered nationwide by the Educational Testing Service.

Bibliography

Guerin, Lisa. "Language and Accent Discrimination in the Workplace." Nolo. Nolo, 2014. Web. 30 Mar. 2-15.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Matsuda, Mari J. "Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction." Yale Law Journal 100.5 (1991): 1329–407. Print.

McDonald, Laughlin. Rights of Racial Minorities: The Basic ACLU Guide to Racial Minority Rights. 2nd ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. Print.

Nguyen, Beatrice Bich-Dao. "Accent Discrimination and the Test of Spoken English: A Call for an Objective Assessment of the Comprehensibility of Nonnative Speakers." California Law Review 81.5 (1993): 1325–1361. Print.