Hina Imam is a Vancouver-based writer.
It was supposed to be a compliment when my next-door neighbour commented that I spoke English well and that I didn’t even have an accent. She had meant it as praise, but it didn’t feel that way.
Instead, I was having an out-of-body experience, rapidly replaying my own words in my head. What was I saying? How was I saying it?
The way a new acquaintance perceives you can feel quite jarring, especially if they comment on something you’ve never noticed about yourself. Even if the observation is “good,” in my mind I always wonder: Could I have put on a better performance, had I known someone was watching me closely? I recall telling my neighbour that I had recently moved to Canada, and had lived in two different countries before that. In true immigrant fashion, I felt I needed to explain my background and the complexities that come with it.
This encounter happened during my first week in Vancouver. It was the summer of 2018, and I was leaving my dingy basement suite to buy groceries when I spotted the friendly neighbour outside, watering her front lawn.
She noted that my parents must be proud of me. I thanked her, sheepishly, before heading on my way.
Both my parents had humble upbringings. They grew up in big families with seven children on each side and attended public schools in Pakistan, with their education primarily in Urdu. While they can speak, read and write in English well, they aren’t fluent in comparison with their three children. In South Asian cultures, English is seen as a gateway to success, signifying class mobility. They made sure we learned English from a young age to have better prospects, even if that meant that, at one point, more than half of my father’s paycheque went toward our education.
The friendly neighbour wasn’t wrong – my parents are proud of me. But I wish they didn’t have to be.
Two summers ago, I was working at a community radio station and dabbling in hosting. My mom was eager to know what I sounded like on the air, and I eventually shared a clip with her from an interview I’d done.
Speaking to my dad about it a few days later, he mentioned in passing that he had also listened to the segment.
“So, what did you think?” I asked.
“I noticed you have started saying your name differently,” he responded.
“Um, what do you mean?”
“Like, you have an accent now. You say it in a white person way.”
My dad is very matter-of-fact sometimes, so this wasn’t surprising. But again, I entered into that out-of-body state. How was I saying my name differently? How did I say it before?
I listened back to the interview, and he had a point. I had subconsciously switched my name’s pronunciation slightly to sound like Henna, a hybrid between Hannah and Hina. You have to pick your battles, and correcting people in a new country on how to pronounce my name wasn’t a fight I wanted to take on. Perhaps that’s why I started to introduce myself in a “white person way.”
Do I have an accent? In Canada, I don’t. At least, that’s what I’m often told, though my dad might disagree. He thinks I have developed an accent of a whiter persuasion, so it depends on who you ask.
My cadence, ”foreign-sounding” or otherwise, was front of mind when I came across ads for a show in Vancouver this spring called Comedy With An Accent: a stand-up show wherein “we laugh and cry in accents,” the playbill promised. I knew I had to be in attendance.
“The reason I moved to Vancouver was to go to acting school. I paid a huge tuition to learn acting and guess what I learned – I have an accent,” show creator and emcee Maria Rivadeneyra relayed in one of her opening jokes.
This had the mostly immigrant crowd at the Little Mountain Gallery comedy club in fits.
“They told me if you want to book something, you have to learn the American accent. So here are my lines for my next audition,” she quipped, slipping into an American timbre: “Madam, the floor is already mopped. Should I do laundry now?”
I was hooked, and I knew I wanted to talk to her.
“No matter what, because I’m Mexican they will give me the role of a maid or something similar,” Maria told me of her audition experiences when we connected over Zoom.
In acting school, her instructors didn’t hold back in reminding her that she had a thick accent and that she should try learning to speak like an American.
“They told me it’ll be hard to book roles, especially lead roles, and I honestly tried,” she shared. “I even downloaded apps and all to practice. But it was very hard to get rid of my accent at 26.”
Maria had been interning at Little Mountain Gallery when Comedy With An Accent was born. She decided to use it as a showcase for immigrant comedians, creating a space where having an accent wasn’t the punchline, but more of a jumping-off point to start a discussion (at times emotional, but always with laughter) about the trials and tribulations of being an immigrant.
“I wanted to do something with people, especially immigrants, like me who had ‘weird’ accents,” she told me.
It was refreshing to see accents presented as they were in Maria’s show – to have one’s “weird” way of speaking be normalized in this manner.
A month after seeing Maria’s show, I went to another stand-up showcase that further proved why her work is important. I watched with dread as a white comedian launched into a bit that included imitations of Indian and Chinese people speaking English as non-natives. Not only was it offensive, it was also vapid and tired.
I wondered what the wider implications were for these types of offensive acts. How might the social perceptions of accents affect immigrant communities? If certain accents were greater targets for ridicule, how might this affect a family’s willingness to pass down their native language? How might this play into a second-generation child’s effort to shed any accent they might pick up from their parents?
I took my queries to Martin Guardado, a professor of socio-cultural linguistics at the University of Alberta. Hailing from El Salvador, Prof. Guardado has been in Canada for more than 40 years. His research focuses on “heritage language socialization,” or the study of how a language spoken at home (a “heritage language”) may be passed down when children go to school and/or are socialized in an environment where a different language dominates. He specifically works with racialized communities and has found there are pervasive myths that discourage many immigrants. A common misperception tends to be that by introducing the mother tongue to their children, parents might confuse them or even deter them from having a good grasp of English.
“There are many negative consequences of not passing down the heritage language to the new generations,” Prof. Guardado says.
This topic has affected him personally. When he first started his research two decades ago, he had young children. Speaking with other immigrant parents, he could feel their dual pain of not having maintained communication in their heritage language with their children, while also not being able to fully communicate in the dominant language their children were now speaking. Having been uprooted from their home countries, immigrant families often find later on that grandchildren are unable to communicate in the heritage language with their grandparents.
“The intergenerational connection is broken,” Prof. Guardado points out, underscoring the monolingual ideology at play. “Despite Canada’s multiculturalism policy, there is a bilingual framework, and that framework privileges two languages that have prestige and power.”
Racialization and the histories of colonialism and imperialism are deeply intertwined in Western culture, Prof. Guardado notes. The legacies of these systems still carry on in present-day Canadian culture.
“If you are intelligible, it doesn’t matter what your accent is. People shouldn’t be so focused on sounding like a native speaker. If you can communicate clearly, that’s what’s important,” he added.
Still, in today’s Western world, some English accents are routinely glorified while others are demonized. For instance, everyone loves a British accent or an Australian accent – even a French accent – but non-European accents, such as Indian or Chinese, are often the butt of many (bad) jokes, and the racist undertones are not so subtle.
But Maria forges on. Things have shifted drastically for her since she started doing comedy, which she performs in both English and Spanish. She told me that while she makes fun of her accent on stage and sometimes even exaggerates it for a bit, the truth is it used to be an open wound at one point.
“Comedy sometimes comes from things that hurt us,” Maria tells me, quoting her idol Sofia Niño de Rivera, a Mexican comedian she opened for in early May.
“I was disappointed in myself. I didn’t get an agent after finishing [acting school] or apply for any big audition because I was so scared. Like, ‘Oh, they would say something about my accent,’” she shares with me.
I wondered if comedy had provided any comic relief in her life – was it perhaps a good coping mechanism for her challenges as an immigrant?
“In comedy, you can be your full self,” Maria says in agreement. “It’s like therapy.”
My new immigrant energy has now subsided a bit and I‘ve started pronouncing my name more accurately when introducing myself to people (except for baristas), even if it doesn’t jibe with the Canadian accent.
Ultimately, nobody is devoid of an accent. Everyone speaks in a unique way that reflects something about them – their positionality, and their journey. On the flip side, people may also speak in ways we least expect, challenging our inherent biases and proving our preconceived notions wrong.
Then, it’s a matter of who feels familiar and who feels foreign. The former probably looks like us and has no accent, at least to our own ears; the latter looks different and often speaks differently as well. Depending on our identities and proximity to whiteness, it’s evident that certain kinds of “foreignness” are viewed as better than others. But I still wonder, what if accents were neither good nor bad? They were just there – just neutral.