Do You Sound Asian?

The first time I realized my mom had an accent when she speaks English was in elementary school. She was paying for groceries and the woman at the register asked for her name. She spelled it. I had witnessed this kind of interaction countless times before, but it was the first time I realized her name wasn’t pronounced as a cacophony of letters. 

The first time someone told me my dad had an accent was in middle school. He coached my Odyssey of the Mind team. After he left the room, one of my teammates commented that he couldn’t understand him. It confused me. My dad didn’t have an accent, did he?

As I’ve moved through the world, people have asked me where I’m from and tell me how good my English is. They assure me that my accent is ‘barely noticeable’. I’ve never known how to respond to these interactions.

On the one hand, they seem to mean well, but on the other, I don’t have an accent–at least, not in the way they mean. I grew up in Northwest Arkansas, the only noticeable accent is the same one that most people who live in this part of the state have. 

In sociolinguist Dr. William Labov’s 1996 study of New York English, he contrasts speech features of people of color with those of white speakers. This, and previous work, has prompted further research on race-based differentiations in speech. A language variety that is characteristic of a certain ethnic group is called an ethnolect. Researchers have analyzed and documented ethnolects within English for many groups. For example, African American English is one of the most well-researched dialects of English. However,  Asian American English is under-researched. 

Asian American?

A major challenge in defining what it means to “sound Asian” is that Asian-ness, or even Asian American-ness, is so diverse. 60% of the world’s population lives in Asia. People from China, India, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam are all Asian. But the languages spoken in these countries are vastly different. Many Asian countries have dozens/hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages.

Regardless of country of origin, when people emigrate from Asia to America, they’re Asian American. This term encapsulates first-generation immigrants, their children, and subsequent generations. It even includes those who were adopted by non-Asian families as children. 

When we try to make generalizations about Asian American speech, we’re talking about a set of people with a diverse range of English proficiency. Some Asian Americans can only speak basic English, or almost none at all. Some grew up speaking a language other than English and picked up English in school. Others grow up speaking English and don’t learn another language until they’re forced to take high school Spanish. 

If we ignore this fact, we run the risk of implying that there’s something genetic about Asianness that impacts speech. This simply isn’t true. The way you talk is influenced by those around you (aka your linguistic input). I learned this concept in linguistics, but you can also gut-check it anecdotally. Don’t you talk like your friends? 

This isn’t to say that Asian American English can’t exist. Even though the category of Asian American is very broad, it exists for a reason. Students at UC Berkeley created the term in the late 1960s because they wanted to organize the then fractured coalition to protest the Vietnam War. By creating a “pan-Asian identity” around common goals, Asian Americans multiplied the power of their voice in American democracy and successfully united against racial injustice. Language is part of identity. Perhaps Asians from different backgrounds started to speak in similar ways because they developed a sense of group identity.

Is Asian American English a thing?

At first glance, the linguistics literature seems divided. Many have assumed that Asian American English is just the same as white English. But this 2011 study by Professor Michael Newman and Angela Wu at Queens College found empirical evidence to the contrary. It had participants listen to audio clips of 8 different English speakers and identify their race. Among them were 2 Chinese Americans, 2 Korean Americans, 2 European Americans, 1 Latinx American, and an African American. Participants successfully differentiated between races with higher accuracy than you’d expect by chance. However, they couldn’t differentiate between Chinese speakers and Koreans. Features such as breathier voice and a slight difference in the way people say the vowel in the word “dress” seemed to make people “sound Asian”.

This provides some empirical evidence that sounding Asian is a thing, but this isn’t generalizable to all Asians. The study only included East Asians, and the differences they documented subtle compared to other ethnolects (say, African American English for example). 

Accent Hallucination

It’s also important to note that there are confounding variables. One of these is “accent hallucination”, a phenomenon where people perceive an accent when there is none. Dr. Donald Rubin documented this in 1992. His study separated participants into two groups and had them listen to the same lecture given by a white native English speaker. One group saw a picture of a white lecturer and the other saw a picture of an Asian lecturer. The study found that just seeing a picture of an Asian lecturer associated with an audio recording caused students to have lower listening comprehension than students listening to the same recording who were shown a picture of a white lecturer. Many have replicated these results since 1992. In fact, someone in my linguistics class this semester did a version of this experiment through Amazon Mechanical Turk, and he saw similar results. 

The English Learner Accent:

When people think about sounding Asian, they usually don’t think about what I’ve discussed above. Honestly, I didn’t either before linguistics. The dominant narrative says that “Asianness” is foreign. You can see this caricatured version of “Asianness” through minor characters like Long Duk Dong from 16 Candles.

I could write a whole other blog post about this, but suffice it to say there are reasons why Asians who learn English as a second language have trouble pronouncing certain letters. As this video from Vox says, it even gives people the opportunity to learn about another language. 

“Forever foreigner” and “Honorary white”

So is Asian American English a thing? The answer is maybe. When people talk about sounding Asian, we need to clarify what that means. Does sounding Asian mean sounding foreign? Does it mean having an ethnolect like African American English? Or does it mean something else entirely? As I’ve researched for this blog post, I talked to other Asian Americans who told me about adjusting their accent, sentence structure, or diction to be more like their parents’ when they’re in conversation.  In linguistics, we call that “accommodation”. 

The little existing research suggests that there are distinct features that make people sound Asian. Even some non-linguists notice these features, but you would be hard pressed to find someone that could articulate what they were. 

What it means to sound Asian is complicated because what it means to be Asian is complicated. In America, some people see Asians as “forever foreigners”. This explains why people presume that they’re native speakers of a language other than English. This racial prejudice may be a source of accent hallucination, which would explain why people tell me I have an accent.

On the other hand, people also portray Asians as “honorary white”. This leads people to assume that Asians just sound like white people. This is problematic and leads to a process called “erasure”, in which ideology leads a linguistic difference to be unnoticed or explained away.  

Linguistics can be prescriptive (telling people how they should use language) or descriptive (describing how people actually use language). I, along with most other modern linguists, am a descriptive linguists. And the intuitions of non-linguists can help guide our research!

What does sounding Asian mean to you?