Foreign accents are rarely sexy

A reminder that my comedy album, ‘The Palace of Earthly Delights’, will be releasing this Sunday, July 12th via this newsletter.

Now on with today’s post.

I don’t think non-native speakers of English, eager to practice our era's lingua franca, will ever understand how it feels, when you’ve shown that you’re capable of having a conversation with someone in another language, and even may have been connecting with them nicely, proving yourself completely fluent, and then they throw in a few sentences of English at the end just to show that they could have had the conversation in English all along. That they make it clear – your efforts are sweet, but I was at base humouring you.

You might refer to this as an ‘accent tax’. The fact that, regardless of fluency, the presence of a foreign accent in a language other than English is liable to provoke an unsolicited switch into English, or at least a tension about this occuring; the idea that speaking a language with an accent is an automatic sign that the world language should be initiated.

These days it isn’t even an English accent which provokes this; any non-native accent is seen as a prompt to change, even if the other language itself is spoken fluently. It’s as if an order has come down on from on high to not speak anything other than English with foreigners, and there has been a switch to this attitude, a homogenisation, in living memory, particularly in customer service settings. And I know from my own experiences at various Brussels guichets that these days people plenty of people show up to shops and services and just expect English to be spoken, without even asking, know that the link between ‘living abroad’ and ‘learning the local language’ has been broken.

In the Anglosphere, switching to the interlocutor's native language doesn’t happen, no matter how bad the speaker’s accent in English, in part because there is no other language to switch to but also that to switch on someone clearly struggling in a foreign language is seen as rude. I speak four languages myself, and would never show up a German or a French person if I heard them struggling in English in the UK; ironically, they’re usually delighted to speak their native language in such situations as the opportunity arrives much more rarely.

But the further irony here is that foreigners speak English with all manner of accents and it is no impediment to their ‘mastery’ of the language. Senior people at professional organisations can do all their business in fast American English with the thickest accent and still put down on their CV ‘full professional proficiency’. They are not lying. You can come into the English-speaking world and be acclaimed for your acting, like Javier Bardem, and still do your roles in a thick Spanish brogue. You can be one of the great political philosophers in Hannah Arendt and still speak English with an intense German accent which you show no desire to improve. It’s even a little quirky! In English-speaking culture, un accent n’est pas la guerre.

Can you imagine the same in other cultures? That bad accents would be not so much tolerated as celebrated? Of course, there are people who come in from outside language communities and do extraordinary things, the Canadian comedian Dashan (big mountain) for example, whose Chinese got good enough to perform on Chinese TV and who became something of an ‘honorary Chinaman’ for an older generation. Jodie Foster often appears in French films in French – indeed, quite a few female Anglophone actors have gone that route.

Yet it always seems such a big deal, not being native, like the comedian Gayle Tufts who in Germany used to make shows out of her bad German; or the Dutch comedian Rudi Carell, who’d made his living performing in Germany and whose German was fluent with a Dutch accent, being asked by an interviewer, ‘Can you speak better German than you do?’

Of course, all these figures were embraced by other cultures, just in a different way than elsewhere, with a greater sense of their uniqueness. There were fewer of them, I suppose, and more of a fuss is made of the non-native, more strangeness attached to their accent. I remember when I used to perform stand-up comedy in German audiences used to tense up when I spoke German, with a sense of ‘Who is this guy and why does he know our culture?’ The way round that was to encase it in English; they didn’t mind German-speaking sections within English sets, but an Englishman purely doing German was too much for them. Or maybe I just wasn’t very funny in German.

Living abroad, I’ve always felt my accent is an elephant in the room. You’re waiting to say something, and then you do, and sometimes you see such disappointment in people’s eyes when you speak – even something akin to fear. Who is this person? Where do they come from? Why do they know my language? How am I to behave?

Being most used to hearing them, most English native speakers are very welcoming to non-native accents, and yet for other language communities it seems to present an enormous challenge to hear their language mispronounced. The switch to English in these contexts seems at some level a desire to preserve the purity of the tribe and perhaps even some kind of compensation for not speaking the world language by emphasising exclusivity. Our language is smaller, but it’s pure.

There are glorious exceptions; Italian and Spanish speakers are extremely welcoming, as they are welcoming to outsiders in most contexts. Have food! Have shelter! Have language! And I suspect members of minority language communities would be delighted, if surprised, to hear, say, English-accented Basque.

Yet at base, having an accent means ‘getting the sounds wrong in a way that shows you don’t come from round here.’ At base it means ‘I speak your language worse.’ For most people, it still seems to present an obstacle to taking someone quite so seriously as they would as a native speaker. It’s worth saying to that it’s virtually impossible to eradicate a foreign accent from a second language learnt as an adult, and nor should that really be anyone’s goal; keeping it sounding relatively pleasant is a more realistic ambition. Yet it still seems very strange that it could be seen as ‘cute’ or ‘sexy’ or even ‘endearing’ to effectively wear a big propellor hat on your head which says ‘foreigner’ and vigorously twirl it round by the power of your own vocal chords.

The irony of it is that when my accent does bring a switch to English the English itself is often dire, with the thickest non-native accent imaginable. It wouldn’t annoy me so much, this cacophonous mangling of my native tongue, if there wasn’t this concordant strictness about the use of, say, French. As a group of speakers the French react to the slightest mispronunciation of English as if the Panthéon were being defiled. As I’ve written elsewhere recently, you can have the world language or you can have a perfectly pronounced language, but not both. A world language looks like English does these days – people filtering the language through their native tongues and sound clusters and something semi-coherent emerging. A tool, but not a refined one.

However, I will absolutely not accept is that the French accent is sexy in English. Why is it sexy to not make the slightest attempt to pronounce the words right? Why is it sexy to not make the merest gesture in the direction of English phonology? To treat correct English pronunciation like the shit on your shoe? All those pinched French vowels, the absence of plural ‘s’, the complete absence of ‘h’ sounds…. Bah. Laziness isn’t sexy. Calques aren't sexy. Couple that with an attitude that treats the slightest infraction of la langue de Molière as an international scandal, and you have what I would argue is a robust linguistic anaphrodisiac. Now, I do indeed agree that the French are very sexy, just in French.

In reality, as a punter, I have to say that I find vanishingly few foreign accents in English sexy. Germans are endearing for five minutes but the unchanging rhythm and endless Americanisms soon become annoying; the Norwegians sound weirder the more you listen, and while I have a soft spot for how the Dutch sound in English, small doses are fine. Indeed, having spent a large part of my life listening to non-native English, there are only two accents I would say really reliably profile as sexy; the Greeks, who come across as really beautifully whispery and calm, and for some reason the Czechs, who just sound oddly amiable.

I can only regrettably extrapolate from this that I am unlikely to be sexy in any of my second languages. That I myself sound weird and off-putting when I get all the sounds slightly wrong, just as foreigners do to me. This was always my dilemma in Germany – I didn’t know which language to speak with German dates.

Frankly, after years living in their country, my German was almost inevitably better than their English, but at the same time, they wanted their charming Englishman to be in English. To live the Colin Firth fantasy for an evening. In my experience, there’s also an unspoken convention that in relationships it’s the woman who does the linguistic heavy lifting, tho most of the male speakers of smaller Northern European languages that I know prefer to speak English with their foreign partners.

Whatever, while I think we can get good at foreign languages, and that learning them is massively enriching, aiming to be hot in in an auxilliary tongue is a fool's errand. Certainly for a guy, the basis of sexiness is charm, which requires improvisation, and it is damnably difficult to improvise in a second tongue. Even my body language, an important part of coming over as attractive, grows notably goofier and less controlled when communicating in a second tongue.

There’s a lot of soppy nonsense about how mispronouncing words is a sign that people learnt said terms by reading them, or than an accent is a sign of bravery, but the fact is we do look down on people with accents. I do and you do too. Even if on some level charming, an accent shows someone is an outsider; perhaps one sees them spoken to a little slower, taken as a little bit more stupid, or, as we began with, refusing to speak the local language with them at all. An accent is presumed to indicate that you don’t understand the language, or the culture; it means things get dumbed down for you and ignorance is presumed. Plus there is often tho not always that aforementioned look of fear from people when they hear your accent and struggle to know how to behave and where to allocate you.

Luckily, we’ve now created an international language where you can pronounce it however you want, whenever you want, all the while imagining you sound like Tom Cruise or Olivia Rodrigo. Perhaps that is sexy, in the sense of ‘an easy lay’, a language which is anybody's. For if there’s one thing an international language can’t afford to have, it's standards.