Why the way we sound still determines who is heard Premium

Explore how accent influences authority and communication, revealing the hidden biases in language and the quest for authentic expression.

It’s a scene that stays with you as an educator: sitting over an answer script that radiates creativity, only to find that the voice behind the pen is still suppressed by a profound, self-imposed silence. I recently evaluated a student’s answer script whose written arguments were sophisticated and persuasive. However, when it came to oral presentations, she faltered, not due to lack of knowledge, but because of a paralysing fear that her mother-tongue influence made her accent inappropriate for the academic stage. Obviously, her rural background with mother tongue as language of instruction did not weaken cognitive skills. Instead, what it has stifled is English communication skills.

Sometimes students’ anxiety makes you ponder the hidden cost of correction. Observing oral presentations, I sometimes bump up against a rule we seldom talk about: that authority in public life isn’t just about what you say, but how you sound while saying it.

Behind the tidy diagrams of speech sounds lies a puritan fantasy: that English has a correct sound, and that any deviation from it, signals a deficiency in education, intelligence, and even character. Once phonetic norms begin to determine a person’s presentability, employability, sophistication, and trust, accent privilege dons the mask of competence and patrols the borders of who is allowed to be heard. What often passes as clarity turns out to be little more than elite comfort.

Curiously enough, during and after India’s 1983 World Cup victory at Lord’s, Kapil Dev spoke comfortably in unpolished Indian English. In spaces saturated with colonial prestige, he did not slide into accent mimicry, even at a time when Indian captains were expected to sound Oxford-adjacent to be taken seriously. He did not announce this as resistance. He simply spoke unmindful of the fact that English fluency and accent were quietly linked to thinking cricket.

A mere purist approach to phonetics rests on a rather comforting belief that human speech sounds can be easily classified, transcribed, and reproduced through a universal system. The study of English pronunciation inherits a deeper assumption from Western scientific rationality itself: that sound can be neatly coded, stabilised, and disciplined.

For many language trainers, the International Phonetic Alphabet is a reassurance that speech can be neatly mapped and corrected whenever deviations occur. For sound engineers, speech therapists, and certain technical tasks, this works well. But when this logic migrates into classrooms, corporate training programmes, and hiring practices, it becomes something else entirely. The living voice is recast as a defect to be fixed or rejected. What begins as description quietly becomes prescription.