Recently I’ve noticed that in my interactions with call centers, I’ve been talking with people with mild accents that I can’t really place, but sound vaguely Dutch. Since I have not recently read of a massive outsourcing of call centers to the Netherlands, I conclude I am talking to accent-neutralized people in India or Phillipines. So that gets me wondering, how do these accent-reduction classes work, and how well do they work? Some of my co-workers from India and China have extremely heavy accents, to the point of impeding conversation, and I’m thinking of initiating a company effort to get them some kind of help for that.
I can’t answer your question, but, I have sort of an anecdote:
I had a girlfriend from Egypt a few years ago, that had the standard ME accent. I called her at work and some woman went through her so-and-so-company spiel, and I asked for my gf. She said ‘it’s me-I’m using my Oklahoma accent.’
danged if it wasn’t.
hh
Actually, some companies do outsource their call-centres to countries like the Netherlands, especially companies which have a lot of european customers.
The reason is that many people in the Netherland will speak fluent English, Dutch and possibly either French or German. If you’ve got one staff member who can answer calls in 3 or 4 languages, it saves time and money.
My friend worked for the Xerox call-centre in Dublin, where they took advantage of both her fluent French and her Irish accent- the francophones customers were happy, and the anglophones liked the Irish accent. Another friend who was Norwegian, but also spoke Swedish, Danish, German and English worked for another call-centre in Dublin, dealing with all their Scandinavian customers.
Irish accents are well “liked” in part, I think, because they tend to enunciate clearly.
An accent has no such property as “enunciated clearly”. You get people who enunciate clearly, you get people who don’t. Their accent has nothing to do with it.
Irish accents are popular with many English speakers because they are similar enough to be understood by them, but different enough to be interesting and stimulating.
Similarly, in regard to the OP, any “accent reducing” is not removing accent. It’s simply teaching another accent that maybe more familiar to the listener. Neither do people have ‘heavy’ accents. They simply have an accent that differs more from your own and to which you are not familiar.
Obviously this is a problem when it comes to communication (and you could argue it’s as much a problem with you, the listener, as the speaker.) But it’s a mistake to approach the problem as if you’re helping these people out by ‘reducing’ or ‘neutralising’ something.
In an office where a supermajority speaks native English, these people are speaking with a heavy accent. You are of course free to phrase that reality in whatever way best suits your sensibilities; I’ll just think of it as your “accent”.
I didn’t come up with the terms “accent reduction” or “accent neutralization”, that’s just what they call the training. A number of people have trouble understanding them, and given the choice between teaching 20 people to speak more intelligibly or teaching 180 people to learn a foreign accent or language, the choice is fairly obvious. And it is helping them, as in helping them keep their jobs.
Do the classes teach American English? There have been times when I’ve called SBC, and the person on the other end of the line speaks Indian English. “I am thanking you very much for calling SBC. My name is Mike. You will kindly tell me your telephone number please.”