What’s Your Accent?

I was on the phone not long ago interviewing a client’s donor for an article. She was from Minnesota, and I could tell. It was a great accent — right out of Prairie Home Companion.

What’s your accent? If you speak English anywhere in the world, you have an accent to somebody’s ears — even if it’s the flat “television-speak” that we’re used to hearing from our national newscasters — to someone, somewhere, that’s an accent!

Accents tell less about who we are than they do about who people THINK we are. Certain accents have certain stereotypes. Think of the Geico Gecko. Nothing gets the attention of the American ear like an Anglo-Australian voice pattern. Yet if that same little lizard spoke with a bluegrass “twang” we’d have a whole different impression of him and the company. The message would have been the same, but how we received the message would be completely different.

How is this a career topic? No, I’m not suggesting that you start speaking like the Gecko, but consider what “accent” you bring to your work and what that person across the table is thinking. It may have nothing to do with what you’re saying, but a lot to do with what s/he THINKS you’re saying. Their fiction could be stranger than your truth.