Here’s a test you can take to find out how accurate your race-detecting skills are: http://www.uiowa.edu/~c103112/profile.html.
“You sounded … taller … on the phone.”
Is anyone else thinking of that All in the Family episode where Archie is in the hospital, and his roommate is a black Frenchman, but Archie doesn’t know he’s black because the curtain is kept pulled between the two beds, and all he has to go by is the French accent?
I call a LOT of people and have noticed among people who work in big offices downtown a homogenization of accents that has left me unwilling to make a guess, even though I have their name and location in front of me. Even Brits in Britland are starting to sound like Johnny Carson.
8 of 10.
Black and white were really easy for me to identify. I screwed up on all the others. It would have been better if they would have just given us a list to choose from for each of the numbers, I think. I didn’t even know what options I was allowed to type for proper answers (since when is Indian a race?)
I got all correct except for the three Hispanic ones, but I think that is more because I didn’t know what the choices were.
The second and third options aren’t entirely exclusive. If I can sometimes but not always distinguish, that also means I cannot reliably distinguish. I chose cannot reliably, because that’s what’s most important to me in the moment. I ALWAYS have some sort of image in my head of whomever I’m talking to, but I discount the image because I know it’s unreliable.
Similarly, there was a company my group worked with whose receptionist - unseen by us - was by her telephone voice obviously beautiful and desirable and young. We would occasionally wax poetic about her appeal. So much so, in fact, that when we finally made a field trip to visit their office, we kind of raced to get to be the first to see her. She was easily 80. And very, very sweet.
Nine out of ten on the linguistic test. I missed the first Hispanic one because I didn’t realise it was a choice.
My vote was number two, with the majority.
I couldn’t find a link - this story happened at least 20 years ago. A black man (I believe he was a former Marine) worked as a phone sex worker pretending to be a woman for quite a long time. He was fired when his employer realized he was a man, and he filed suit. Details are a bit fuzzy…but yeah, you can’t always tell! (And usually it’s irrelevant. Except when you’re talking dirty to someone you imagine is an attractive young woman.)
My phone doesn’t also provide video unless the other person is also using Skype and we both decide to enable video. Therefore I don’t know the answer to your question. I have no way of corroborating my intermittent hunches about the race of the person I’m speaking with so I could be pretty accurate or dead wrong most of the time or anywhere in between.
Most often it doesn’t occur to me one way or the other to wonder. Something about the voice has to trigger the question itself.
I don’t think in the last twenty years (basically after five years of living in the US and getting accustomed to the accents) I don’t think I have ever not identified an African American voice. By African American I mean someone actually born in the US. Not an immigrant from Haiti, Nigeria or various countries in the Caribbean, South America or Africa.
I started working on a project a year ago with people from New England to South Carolina and every place in between. About 50 people on numerous conference calls. We had our first in person meeting last week. There were four black people in the group. Three I had guessed were black. The fourth had an accent I couldn’t figure out. Turned out she was born in D. R. Congo, and grew up in Poland. Had a French name, but accent was definitely not French.
I did fail once to identify someone as Black. Even when I met her. Her father was Black, but she never knew him. She was raised by her mother, a first generation Czech immigrant. Everyone assumed that she was white, but she self identified as white on her new hire paperwork.
I voted yes but as usual the answer is more complicated - I can usually identify a black speaker but not necessarily vice versa - white people don’t “sound white” to me but black people generally do “sound black”. Granted, I live in South Carolina and there absolutely is a cultural dialect difference. I have been surprised once or twice, though, upon meeting somebody in person. Not often.
I mean, I always have an imaginary person in my head at the other end of a phone line - old or young, etc. Don’t the rest of you? And when they’re, say, looking for their library card I picture them pawing through an old lady purse or a young guy wallet on a chain or whatever. And when they yell at their kids I picture their kids too climbing the fridge or whatever. Maybe I’m just a concrete thinker.
ETA - for example, in my 34 years on this planet I have never heard anybody who wasn’t at least middle aged, usually older, and black pronounce the letter “r” as “ayr-uh”. I’m sure somewhere there is a young white guy who does, but I haven’t met him yet.
I am on the phones a lot in my work at a 9-1-1 center and occasionally have cause to bring up the driver’s license record or Immigration record of the caller complete with photo. In essence I’ve already tested the OP’s question and the answer is and emphatic NO.
I can pick out accents and even get quite specific about nationality (sounds like he’s from Montserrat, not Barbados, etc…) but it tells me nothing specific about the individual’s race.
Sure I can say that by hearing a Jamaican accent that the odds are the caller is black but that is only because most (90%+) Jamaicans are black. I can in no way distinguish a white or Asian Jamaican from a black Jamaican by voice alone. Same goes for Bostonians, Texans, or pretty much any distinguishable accent or dialect group.
Conversely, I speak on the emergency radio system to dispatch calls. Many emergency responders form a mental image of our staff and are often surprised when they stop by the communications center and meet us in person. I’ve asked them about those mental images and they are often laughably off the mark, only routinely getting our genders correct.
I answered “sometimes” and that’s based on experience. I’ve sold or given away a lot of stuff using a local online classified ad site, and I get calls on these ads. When someone says they’re coming over, I have a generic mental picture in my mind based on the voice - sex, age, race/ethnicity - so when a strange car pulls into my driveway, I can know if it’s the ad respondent or someone else. Sometimes I guess right, sometimes not.
It doesn’t really matter but I also don’t think it’s a horrible trait to make these assumptions. It’s not like I greet anyone by saying “Gee, you sound like an old black woman on the phone!!”
I talk to almost all of my clients on the phone before I meet them in person, so I get a chance to check my guesses. I haven’t been wrong yet; every client I guessed was probably black turned out to be black and vice versa. I also have a damn good track record on sexual orientation. Virtually everyone tells me, and I’ve guessed right the huge majority of the time.
May I ask what work you’re doing that your clients volunteer (or you inquire about) their sexual orientation?
Here in Cali, among the under 30 set, that’s all broken down. Only some black people “sound black”. Suburban black girls in particular usually have some variety of Valley girl dialect. So do Chinese girls.
I like to think I sound somewhat black over the phone, and people in the DC area where I grew can usually tell, but I found that was not the case in Wisconsin. I’d get “I had no idea you were black” more times than I could count.
Well, it wasn’t clear how many races you were supposed to be choosing from, so that’s not a very good test. The Middle Eastern Guy and the Indian guy were obvious after the first 2 words. I got 7/10 correct, but I would have done better if they had given us a list to choose from.
I’m usually terrible at this.
I think I would rephrase the OP as, “Can you determine the race of a person from their accent”?
Or, better yet, “What info can you determine about a person based on their voice?”
I just watched the movie “Taken” starring Liam Neeson in which he records a phone conversation with his daughter and some man comes and abducts her and talks while the convo is recorded.
Neeson then contacts some FBI expert and asks what they can determine based on the recorded voice and they tell him a whole lot of into - including the likely birthplace of the individual.
Now, normally, I wouldn’t expect to be able to rely on hardly anything that you learn from a movie. But it does seem somewhat reasonable that a lot of good info can be obtained just from someone’s voice.
Race? Probably not. Because a child of any race could be born into a family who lives in a certain location and that child will then likely sound like the other children from that location - regardless of race.
But, I would guess there is a very high probablility that someone can determine the likely birthplace of a person from their voice or … at least … the location where they grew up.
What do you think?
I also speak with many people on the phone before I meet them and I usually can get a very accurate picture of what they look like before I meet them.
But, then I moved to this small town in which there are lots and lots of KKK people. (Ku Klux Klan) and now it is much harder to guess correctly because when they show up, I find it very difficult to tell what they really look like under that damned hood. I really wish they outlawed those damned hoods.
j/k
