Why are some accents less acceptable than others?

Hi guys, as you know, I have been traveling a lot this year in Europe: Spain, France, Andorra, Portugal, Italy, Greece and of course the UK where I live and when you're traveling so much, you tend to seek the comfort of an English language TV station when you arrive in a hotel room. Well, one very common station for us English speakers to turn to is the BBC World News and I remember my discomfort (if I may be ever so honest) when I saw a report presented by Filipino newscaster Rico Hizon. I was trying to decide if I simply didn't like his presenting style or if it was his strong Filipino accent that bothered me - I think it was both, but probably this reveals my personal prejudice against the Filipino accent. You see, I do have Filipino friends and I even have Filipinos in my extended family on my partner's side of the family. I attended a family wedding last summer and the bride was half-Filipino, but her family are crazy rich Filipinos who were mostly educated in America and they certainly spoke English with an American accent rather than a typical Filipino accent that one might associate with domestic workers from the Philippines. I remember trying to establish rapport with them by speaking to them in Tagalog (I speak both Spanish and Malay rather well, hence Tagalog is easy for me) and they gave me this stare like, "we don't even speak Tagalog, we speak English amongst ourselves, why are you speaking Tagalog with us?" So I had misjudged the situation and that's even with my own Filipino relatives in my extended family!

The same can be said about the relationship Singaporeans have with English. Recently when I went on holiday with my sister, my brother-in-law, my nephew and my partner, I did speak Singlish with my family but the moment my partner joined the conversation, I would switch to standard English. For me the rule is simple: I don't expect non-Singaporeans to understand Singlish, so speaking Singlish in front of a non-Singaporean person would simply exclude them from the conversation (especially since my Singlish contains plenty of loanwords from Asian languages) and that could be seen as rude. When there's a white person in the room, I always default to standard English and it's called code switching: loads of well-educated Singaporeans do this all the time. So Rico Hizon has an important job with the BBC, why doesn't he code switch? He sounds unapologetically, even stereotypically Flipino. He has been doing this job at the BBC for 18 years, surely that's long enough for him to adopt a more white accent like many of the very well-educated Filipinos. Why is he addressing his audience in a Filipino accent, when his audience are not Filipino? When I hear his accent, I can't help but be reminded of the skits various Singaporean comedians cruelly mocking the Filipino accent. I am also reminded of the character Tricia Takanawa from Family Guy who has an exaggerated Japanese accent. So let's compare Rico Hizon to another BBC World News present Mariko Oi - her native language is Japanese but she was educated in Australia, so she doesn't speak English with a Japanese accent: it is standard English, received pronunciation with a slight hint of an Australian accent. Hence if you heard her on the radio, you simply wouldn't know that she was Japanese.

But here's the other side of the argument: there's no real reason for Hizon to have a 'white' accent like Mariko Oi or myself. Mariko was educated in Australia, I have spent more than half my life in Europe. Hizon was educated entirely in the Philippines according to his Wikipedia page and has only worked in Asia, even though as a broadcast journalist he has mostly worked in English (rather than Tagalog). His English may be accented but still understandable, so perhaps it is my own insecurities at play here. I was thinking, "there are so many highly educated Filipinos who speak English with a British or American accent, why pick someone who doesn't sound white to do a job like that?" But what I was really thinking was, "urgh, I hope the white people who see this don't think that all of us South-East Asian people speak English with that kind of accent, some of us have been educated in the West you know." Perhaps there's really nothing wrong with having an Asian accent, it is my own prejudice that is the problem. The thing is that there are plenty of Asian broadcast journalists in the West but they tend to be the ones who sound totally white. Let's take Connie Cheung for example - she is a famous Chinese-American broadcast journalist who had been seen by American audiences since the 1970s and became a news anchor on NBC, making her the first Asian person to ever do that job in mainstream American TV. She then also worked with ABC, CNN and MSNBC. But of course, Cheung was born in America and grew up there, so she sounded totally American - well, she sounded totally white. She didn't have a hint of a Chinese or Asian accent. Would she have been able to achieve all that in her career if she had a strong Asian accent like Hizon? Oh definitely not.

But then again, Cheung's career started way back in the 1970s when America was a very different place whilst Hizon never tried to make a name for himself in a place like America, Australia or the UK. Instead, he is based either in the Philippines or Singapore, where he is competing with other South East Asian broadcast journalists instead of white journalists - so the fact that he clearly has a Filipino accent is far less of an issue than say, if he was in London or New York. If you were to look at the accents acceptable on some of the regional TV networks like SCMP and CNA for example, you would see a rather wide range of accents from 'quite white' to very Asian. Let's take an example from SCMP from Hong Kong - Luisa Tam does a series on Cantonese language and local culture, she speaks English well (as in her English is grammatically perfect, she makes no errors) but there's undoubtedly a Cantonese accent to her English. But somehow, there simply isn't that social stigma associated with having that kind of accent as loads of highly educated, rich people from Hong Kong would speak like her. Let's compare her to her colleague Chieu Luu, who is from Hong Kong but educated in Canada. He presents a series called Chieu's Chew where he goes on these interesting culinary adventures. Chieu speaks with a very North American/Canadian accent. Here's a video (which I have embedded below) of him in Bangkok where his local Thai host has obviously been educated in North America so they're both speaking in American English without a trace of any kind of Asian accent. Now that's the kind of situation I'm used to growing up in Singapore, where those who want to work in broadcast journalism must learn to speak English without an Asian accent.

In fact, one of the memories that I have from my childhood is that of newsreader Duncan Watt who read the English news in Singapore for 16 years. We had always just accepted that this was the way English was meant to be spoken, Watt was British and even if he had lived in Singapore since 1976, he didn't pick up a Singaporean accent - in fact his newsreader voice can be described as standard BBC English from that era: it was standard English with received pronunciation and quite posh, it was the voice of a well-educated and privileged man. It was the kind of accent that we had come to associate with someone who was put in that kind of position: remember, this was back before we had the internet so many of us did watch the nightly news to find out what was going on in the world and Watt was the man trusted to give the important news to the nation. Thus his accent became the benchmark for what we had expected when watching the news back then, though things have evolved a lot in the last 20 years when local newscasters now have a range of accents: from moderate to even in some cases, quite strong local accents. So for example, I saw a recent report on CNA featuring their Vietnam correspondent Tung Ngo reporting on the situation of the outbreak of Covid-19 in Danang and never mind speaking with an accent, Tung was speaking in broken English. This was in sharp contrast to his colleague Adam Bakhtiar in the Singapore studio who did the introduction to the report who speaks English flawlessly without a hint of an Asian accent, but then again, Bakhtiar was educated in Australia whilst Tung probably never had that privilege. Hence this begs the question, if the viewers of CNA don't have a problem with the way Tung speaks English, then is there even a problem in the first place? Is this just me being very biased against someone with an Asian accent?

I do believe that the bar has been set too low for a lot of these broadcast journalists in the English speaking world. I have a Finnish friend who is a broadcast journalist in Finland and he speaks ten languages fluently - I'm even excluding those languages that he isn't fluent in! But for him, that's normal - Finland is one of the most multilingual countries in the world with most people being at least effectively trilingual in Finnish, English and Swedish - but they would also be able to converse Norwegian, Danish and German too. Heck, just last December, I was in Estonia and saw a member of staff at the health spa switch between Estonian, English, German, Finnish and Russian with different customers and that's just the lady at the cashier at the entrance of the hotel spa for crying out aloud. Hizon isn't really expected to interview all these different people on the BBC news programme in another language - the only language he needs to operate in is English and for crying out aloud, have we really set the bar so very low? I can only  shake my head in utter disbelief when I see BBC correspondents insisting on interviewing people in English rather than make any attempt to speak the local language, they end up with interviews with people struggling on in English and I'm left thinking, what is the purpose of the interview? If it is to get information vital to the story, then you shouldn't have interviewed this person in English if that person clearly can't speak English. Get an interpreter if you have to or start recruiting correspondents who are not painfully monolingual. Thus I expect someone like Hizon to do a lot more than speak English well, I expect him to be as multilingual as my Finnish friend. There are so many broadcast journalists out there who are brilliantly multilingual and unfortunately they don't seem to work for the BBC as the BBC seem to still expect the rest of the world to speak English.

So, let's compare this to the situation in the UK where I have been living since the 1990s. If we go back to the very beginning of broadcasting, I did find some vintage news reels from the 1950s and 1960s but I found the parody of it by British comedians Mitchell & Webb far more entertaining (see the video below). The rationale worked like this back then: the people allowed to go on radio and TV to inform and entertain the public were those who were well-educated and usually of the upper class. Hence the mentality was, "I'm educated, you're not; I sound different from you because I went to Oxford and you are barely literate. But now you know you can trust me because I know more than you." This mentality persisted for a long time until regional accents were slowly introduced into the media - first through light entertainment programmes which started to feature characters from a more diverse background, speaking in different accents (be it working class accents or regional and foreign accents) and slowly that crept over from entertainment into the news when it became more political correct to have the news presented by a more diverse group of news readers, from different backgrounds, with different accents rather than for it to be reserved strictly for posh, rich, upper class white people. By that token, Duncan Watt represented what things were like in the past whilst Rico Hizon and his Filipino accent is more reflective of the kind of diversity that an organisation like the BBC is striving to create. Indeed, in the age of social media, people now have a much wider range of sources to choose their news and many are trusting sources that feel familiar to them; a good example is Cardi B - the rapper from New York who has 59.3 million followers on Instagram at the time I am writing this. She is a far cry from the kind of posh, upper class white people who used to read the news on the BBC back in the day, but arguably she does have far more influence in the world than your average BBC news reader in 2020.

Indeed, in 2020, the amount of influence you have in the world is probably most easily measured by how many followers you have on Instagram (oh dear, I have 546 followers on my main profile and only 29 on my other one, guess I am a nobody then) or how many hits you have had on Youtube (phew, at least I have had 1.044 million views there) and I am most successful as a blogger here, having racked up 10.94 million pageviews. Thus many of these Youtube celebrities or rappers who have millions of followers on Instagram wield far more influence today through these social media platforms compared to more conventional news platforms like the BBC or CNN. Let's talk about a brilliant Asian comedian that I have seen a lot of on Youtube: Ronny Chieng. He has done so much on Comedy Central and he is undoubtedly the most successful Chinese-Malaysian comedian out there - he was born in Johor Bahru but grew up in Singapore, Australia and America. He speaks English with an accent that I find pretty familiar, given that Johor Bahru is actually just 18 kilometers from where I grew up in Singapore and my dad is from the state of Johor as well. He's a brilliant comedian and he is obviously a very smart guy, but he doesn't feel the need to change his accent or sound more white in order to be accepted in the West. Like me, he's probably spent more than half his life in the West, yet he still sounds distinctively Malaysian. kudos to him, he has found success in a very difficult market. Heck, I have so many actor and comedian friends here in the UK who would give an arm and a leg for even half the success that Chieng has achieved. The reason why successful media stars like Cardi B and Ronny Chieng have such wide appeal has got to do with the fact that many of their fans feel they can relate to them - they don't try to sound posh or upper-class, they are simply being themselves.

English has become the global lingua franca in the world of entertainment - people from every continent in the world are consuming many of the same movies, TV programmes and music, sometimes with the help of subtitles. So if English is going to be used as the language of entertainment by so many people around the world who don't speak English as a first language, then there is an argument for getting used to a much broader range of non-native accents in English if your audience are not native speakers to begin with. So if we're dealing with TV programmes for an international audience like BBC World News, why are we still holding on dearly to either British or American English as some kind of gold standard that people like Hizon must aspire to then? Well, a simple answer to that is intelligibility - Hizon's job is to communicate the news to the viewer and if he has a strong accent, then that impedes his ability to do his job effectively. The classic example I always give to make this point is how people in Singapore have no problem understanding English with an American accent because Singaporeans consume a lot of American media: TV, films, music, Youtube etc, however, the reverse simply isn't true. Go to a small town in the middle of South Dakota or Tennessee and your average local there probably hasn't even heard of Singapore as a country - never mind watched a film or TV programme from Singapore. This is because America exerts a lot of soft power through the power of entertainment on the rest of the world and smaller Asian countries like Singapore are unable to do the same. That's why our Asian accents are thus at best unfamiliar to Westerners or even at times, impossible to understand. This is why Asian newscasters usually default to American or British English, rather than speak with their native accents with Hizon being a notable exception to this rule.

I suppose if Rico Hizon was a comedian and a funny, successful one like Ronny Chieng, then I wouldn't have a problem with his accent. However, he's a broadcast journalist and I'm afraid not a particularly good one at that. I remember when I was in Venice, that was when Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash in Los Angeles and Hizon did interview Bryant this one time - instead of giving the viewers more information about how Byrant died suddenly and tragically, he made it all about himself. Holy fuck. He was talking non-stop about himself and how he got to interview Kobe Bryant; I was like, you need to stop right there and realize this is not about you, the viewers really don't give a shit that you met Kobe Bryant once, this news report should be about Kobe Bryant's accident and death, rather than about Rico Hizon. So yeah, in just five minutes, he managed to irritate me by making it all about himself. I wanted to scream at the TV, "this is not about you! Nobody gives a fuck about you! People actually care that Kobe Bryant died, nobody gives a shit about you. Stop talking about yourself already!" That's not what a good broadcast journalist should ever do, you're there to bring the viewers the story rather than allow your ego to take over like that. So if Hizon's Pinoy accent didn't irritate me that morning, his ego certainly did. Hence it isn't just Hizon's Pinoy accent that fails to endear him to me, I also think that he is not very good at his job either. I was amazed that nobody in the studio actually threw a shoe at him to stop Hizon in his tracks as he was going on and on and on about himself. So no, it is not just his Pinoy accent that irritates me. I'm just shocked he can make a whole career out of being a symbol of diversity for the BBC, without being competent at his job.

Well, that's it from me on this issue - what do you think? Am I being too harsh on Hizon? Do you think that he is merely employed to fulfill some kind of BBC commitment to diversity? Or is his Filipino accent really not that big a deal, that we should all get more used to non-standard accents in the media these days? Have you seen him on TV before and what do you think of the way he speaks and his accent? Would Hizon's accent bothered you if he was on a Filipino news channel as opposed to the BBC? Or am I just prejudiced against the Filipino accent because Singaporeans tend to associate that with Filipino domestic workers (I refer you to the clip above featuring Michelle Chong)? How would the audience in the West react if for example, the BBC hired a newscaster who spoke with a very working class accent? And is this really about racism, xenophobia or class identity? Do leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.