The governor’s new accent
I recently met a desi Louisianan who insisted that Bobby Jindal’s accent is of recent vintage. ‘We knew him growing up,’ she said, ‘and like me, he had no Southern drawl. It appeared all of a sudden when he ran for governor.’ Another friend who went to college with Jindal confirms he had a neutral American accent back then.
Jindal would hardly be the first politician to gin up a folksy drawl. Dubya adopted a Texan accent and bought a dude ranch even though he grew up privileged in Connecticut. George ‘Macaca’ Allen grew up wealthy in Southern California but adopted a Southern accent at the University of Virginia. Hillary Clinton was accused of speaking in a false drawl before a gathering of Southern blacks.
In entertainment, actress Katrina Kaif’s British accent is slowly submerging beneath the soft phonemes of Indian English during her long Bombay sojourn. But she hasn’t swapped it wholesale — her accent is still a hybrid. Desi American friends sometimes find themselves using a soft accent in the desh, an unconscious sympathetic response. On occasion I’ve switched from American English to Indian English just to be able to communicate with Bombay customer service confounded by my accent. (I usually switch to Hindi; and because there’s such a chip on their shoulder about the vernacular, they usually reply in English.)
People posit Jindal’s evanescent Louisiana accent as another scale on his skin, another exhibit showing he’s an unusually slippery politician. But politics are inherently artificial. Authenticity in that field isn’t about being a good ol’ boy, it’s about being polished enough and practiced enough to convey a convincing simulacrum. Good politicians are famously skilled at altering policy emphases without flipping their core positions, to appeal to the audience of the moment. We reward them for ferreting out the win-win between warring factions. We even call it speaking their language or speaking in terms they understand.
Outside politics, people try on new traits all the time. The freedom to reinvent yourself is particularly available in America, with its relatively high class mobility. Your D&D-playing friends might call your skydiving weekends inauthentic, but if you persist in your new hobby long enough, it will indeed become a part of you. There’s something essentialist and musty about claiming an accent is rooted in such-and-such place, and outsiders are not welcome.
So I don’t condemn Jindal for adopting a different accent to appeal to his rural constituents. Far from it. Like a new haircut, it’s just part of his personal style. For him it’s even a kind of self-actualization. If he were a better politician, he would’ve phased it in so gradually that few would’ve noticed.
What I condemn him for is being a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in biology who claims to believe in creationism and signs a law to teach that illiteracy in public schools:
[Brown professor] Arthur Landy… taught Jindal genetics in college. “Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn’t make sense… Governor Jindal was a good student in my class when he was thinking about becoming a doctor, and I hope he doesn’t do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana’s doctors.” [Link — hat tip: AK]
That’s inauthentic, crass political opportunism.
on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008, 11:55 pm in Bobby Jindal, Musings, Politics, TV, Video clips › 
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A few hundred years worth of politicians later, people still assume there are some at the top of the hierarchy who are not dissembling? Isn’t it better realizing that a darker shade does not anoint a politician as fundamentally honest? It seems like a liberal version racial typecasting where your color underscores the extent of naivety or as-yet unharmed innocence.
Politicians are the same, irrespective of their spectral positioning, and by extension one should celebrate the gradual realization (being ushered in by the likes of Deval Patrick, Obama, Jindal) that choosing candidates for an office/occupation based on positive or negative stereotypes is rather crude and inefficient.
An acquaintance of mine who works in one of the call centers told me that they are constantly monitored by their “floor managers” and talking to a customer in Hindi (or any other language other than English) is a big no-no. He was once reprimanded by his boss because of this.
Why is desi Americans trying to speak in a desi accent in India an unconscious sympathetic response? Sympthy because the natives can’t understand the America accent?
One thing the desi customer service workers in India need to cut out is the excessive thank you, sir and maams.
Sympathetic in the sense of unconsciously mirroring.
I know the point of this post isn’t the accent, though that is the title - but I knew a woman who was from Baton Rouge, from a very old Louisiana French family, and who, as it happened, also went to Brown undergrad (and later to HBS). She could totally switch accents. With her Southern friends, she turned on the drawl, with others she could talk Yankee. I also knew a guy from Mississippi who went to Ole Miss, but could still do that. So it is fully possible. If you only know someone casually, you could never tell.
Call center reps - whether they’re in India or abroad, do seem to be under a sort of prohibition about switching to Hindi (or any other language). Sometimes I’ve tried to switch to Hindi to explain an abstruse point better, but they are not allowed to respond in that language - and have told me so.
Thanks and sorry for jumping the gun
Such is a politician’s milieu- it’s not limited to oratory tomfoolery. As a person who respects real science, I’m disgusted by such legislation, but I can’t knock Jindal for being a prostitute with his intellect…that’s just what politicians do. But I can not-like him, and I do.
It always sounded American to me.
1) Like Manish already said, it’s an unconscious mirroring that anyone might do in any cultural context. I do it all the time, even with my relatives in Chicago.
2) From my experience, the natives really can’t understand the American accent. But it has nothing to do with not understanding English itself. For example, Indian people seem to understand British English just fine, even if it’s fast. When you speak with an American accent, however, you don’t really enunciate the whole word, you trail off on the last syllable. On top of that, I live in Los Angeles, so my English is fast — no, actually it’s hurried. This annoyed a lot of the people I spoke to in India. I’m sure it annoys a lot of other non-American English speakers. I considered switching to a British accent, but I realized that would have made me feel more clownish than switching to an Indian accent. So I just slowed it down a bit, added a slight Indian accent, and enunciated my words from start to finish. Sometimes it was unconscious, and sometimes I was aware. But the point it, communication went much smoother then, making my life and theirs much easier.
The constant complain that I used to get from my peers and professors in grad school was that Indians spoke too ‘fast’, maybe a bit too fast (and accented) for an American to comprehend
There is no such thing as a standard British accent, plus various accents from Britain are way to hard to understand. Ever hear a FOB Scots (they are British too, Craig Ferguson doesn’t count) speak, you can’t understand a word they is saying.
Yup, The most irritating reality of interaction in India !!! This is our supposed “strength” in the global economy. What a joke ! This whole anti-vernacular is just another class/caste of the Desh.
I have experience with this. Almost impossible to understand.
Fair enough. Lets try: I considered switching to the kind of British accent you hear in entertainment meant for an international audience. Better? :)
The irony that no one in Southern Louisiana speak with a southern accent. Our accents are either Cajun, Yat (New Orleanian), Louisianan (something I can’t put my finger on, but not spoken outside of Louisiana) and plain Americana. No one from Louisiana speaks with a Texan or Memphis twang like the one Bobby has taken on. This is clearly an appeal to the rest of the South. (What does he dare about Louisiana anyway? He’s already lied about there being no oil spills in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, parroting the Republican party line at the expense of his own people.)
Hay-sus Christo, what is wrong with my typing today? That first line was meant to read “The irony is that no one in Southern Louisiana speaks with a southern accent.” The first line after the opening parenthesis ought to be “What does he care about Louisiana anyway?”
Ok, all better now.