Unsurprisingly, I angrily dismissed my mum’s colleagues as a pack of racists and refused to speak on the topic anymore. Even if I didn’t look “Australian,” I thought I could at least sound the part. I’d laugh at these videos before, especially at the crazy accents, but the joke didn’t seem so funny anymore now that I was the punchline. To me, sounding Asian meant sounding like my parents, or worse, sounding like one of those late 2000s Asian Youtubers when they impersonated their parents. At the same time, it didn’t make me feel any prouder of being Chinese either. Back then, the hyphen that linked my Chinese and Australian identities together was in a volatile state of flux, and finding out that someone I’d never met before thought I sounded “Asian,” and therefore different to the mainstream, shattered some of the confidence I had haphazardly built up in being Australian. “Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand them and they actually meant I sounded British?” I asked, trying to make sense of the ridiculousness of it all (Hong Kong, after all, was a former British colony, and sounding British would be acceptable - a compliment even). I’m not sure what angered me the most - the fact that she showed my school assignment to her colleagues, or the fact that they proceeded to say that I had an accent, and not just any accent, but an Asian accent. Of course I reacted with indignation when my mum told me. “Don’t worry,” they reassured her, “it’s only very slight! He still sounds pretty Aussie.” Despite having grown up in Sydney and having done all my schooling in English, I apparently spoke with an “Asian” accent that her workmates decided was from Hong Kong. But instead of gushing praise, her colleagues, most of them white, seemed to only comment on only one thing - my accent. She was obviously proud of the cinematic masterpiece I had whipped up on Windows Movie Maker during the school holidays, and like any proud parent, wanted to share it with everyone she knew. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.When I was twelve, my mum brought a video I’d made for a school assignment to work, and showed it to her colleagues during lunch. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. In this episode of Vox Observatory, we take a look at Japanese, Korean, and Chinese languages and how each affects the pronunciation of Ls and Rs for English-language learners. The accent feature has been a tool for racist portrayals of Asians in media, where white or Asian-American actors were directed to play Asian characters with a heavy, often inaccurate accent.īut a foreign accent is just a phonological hybrid of two languages, and by listening carefully, you can learn some interesting things about linguistics. It’s so well-known that American soldiers in World War II were reportedly told to use code words like “lallapalooza” to distinguish Japanese spies from Chinese allies.īut American movies and TV shows have applied this linguistic stereotype to Korean and Chinese characters too, like Kim Jong Il in T eam America: World Police, or Chinese restaurant employees singing “fa ra ra ra ra” in A Christmas Story. One of the most persistent and well-studied foreign-accent features is a lack of L/R contrast among native Japanese speakers learning English.
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