8 ms·

Accents, Dialects, and Discrimination

52 points by Vigier 6y ago

drivingmenuts 6y ago
I fully admit to an amount of voicism when dealing with recruiters who’ve either emigrated from or are in a call center in India. Many times, I simply can’t parse their English due to their accents, to the point where I just don’t respond to them, either in a phone call or even email (because they might call). Sad, but true.
- samsari 6y ago
  This isn't something I'd be happy admitting to. What steps have you taken so far to address this?
  - curiousgal 6y ago
    I am not a native English speaker, why is it OP's responsibility to decipher what the recruiters are saying? It is their responsibility to master the language and to express themselves clearly.
    - yorwba 6y ago
      Those recruiters most likely have "mastered the language" and are expressing themselves clearly, just in a different accent. If someone interacts with Indian English speakers often enough that they develop a habit of avoiding Indians just in case they might call and speak with an accent they can't understand, it's probably time to do something about that, like getting more exposure in an environment where it's easier to understand (e.g. with subtitles) In the case of recruiting, where there's no obligation to pay any attention to recruiters at all, it might not be much of an issue, but it's only a matter of time until you get an Indian colleague and avoiding them is no longer an option.
      - harperlee 6y ago
        There is a big gap between being functional in a language and perfecting it. Each sound cue not mastered hinders information redundancy and thus increases risk of not being understood. It probably seems like percolation: small crevices that suddenly reach a critical point where comprehension is lost at the receiver side. Also way before that point, the receiver needs more subconscious effort and thus fatigues itself parsing the message.
    - lurtbancaster 6y ago
      It's the responsibility of both the OP's *and* the recruiters. We've societally conditioned ourselves through media that persons with certain accents - cough a very specific kind of British accent cough, are more "sophisticated", and a very specific kind of Southern USA accent as "unsophisticated"; even though logically, the manner in which a person speaks should neither validate nor invalidate the substance of what is being spoken. But implicit bias affects us all and so we have voicism. If we really want to break down voicism monetarily, it's a suboptimal way to work. It makes it more likely that you might reject a good idea because the person who expressed it didn't have the dialect/accent with which you're most familiar. Likewise it makes it more likely you might let a less-than-good idea or a straight-up bad idea get through your filter, because it's been expressed in an accent/dialect you've come to associate with "pleasurable". The OP is self-aware enough to know that this bias exists within them. This is already better than those who might reject any notions of such biases at play. The OP could, for example, to remediate this bias, watch YouTube videos where English is spoken by those from that given region. Whatever this "region" might be. This would help reduce the cognitive burden of parsing accents during any future interactions. So that your brain would be less focussed on the peculiarities of the accent and more focussed on *what* they're actually saying. It would make establishing rapport easier. It's just a better way to work. But like with most things though, practice makes perfect. Also personally I find it fascinating to listen to people speak the same language differently. So it's a fun cognitive exercise to train your mind to ignore the accent and listen to what they're saying. On to the recruiters-side now. Sometimes it's not just unfamiliar accents/dialects, for which they're not at fault whatsoever. Sometimes it's straight-up poor sentencing structure and grammatical errors. And that is obviously not the OP's fault. And is definitely the recruiters' fault. The recruiters stand to gain a lot from being able to express themselves more clearly. But language skill is a much more fundamental problem to address, that's endemic to the educational system and curriculum of that area. There's very little the OP could do, or any one person could do, to remedy that. To summarize, the barrier to de-biasing the OP is, at this moment, much lower than the barrier to fixing deficits in language skills of an entire people in any given region. Obviously things will need fixing from both sides, but let's try to fix what's relatively easy to fix first I guess.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  I wonder if maybe you're not being taken the right way in this thread. I've personally had a few experiences with professors, both in undergrad and grad school, in which I found them hard to understand because of their accents. Rather than dropping the class and complaining about that "foreign professor," I stuck it out and spent significant effort into trying to parse their language, because I knew there were a significant number of things I could learn from these people. What's more, they were actually people to me; I physically interacted with them multiple times a week, every week for a semester or more. If I were cold called by some random recruiter with a thick accent with whom I had no previous relationship, I can't say as I'd put the same amount of effort into trying to understand them. They aren't people I interact with on a near daily basis, and they probably don't have anything interesting to offer me, so I tend toward feeling it's not worth the effort to try and force my brain to hear the message through the accent. Although the Indian call center recruiter is a common stereotype, the thing is, I'd apply the same sort of logic with any accent, in just about any situation I can think of. That is, if the interaction is potentially significant, I'm inclined to expend effort. If they're people I'll be interacting with frequently, I'm also inclined to spend the effort. I've encountered Indian people I couldn't easily understand. I've also encountered Chinese, American, European, and South American people I had difficulty understanding. In each case, I applied the same logic to determine whether I would expend brainpower on understanding their literal words to get at what they were saying. Is this closer to what you meant to say?
- drivingmenuts 6y ago
  I will note that, in person, I don’t usually have a problem understanding Indians. I think maybe those I’ve worked with have had more time with the idioms of American English and practice at reducing their accent.
- boruto 6y ago
  I am an Indian, I struggled to understand Russian and Ukrainian people. After spending an year, I basically speak like them.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    "Not great, not terrible?" :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
transmogrifex 6y ago
This is excellent. Everyone knows that the best way to bring about better engineering in future is to introduce more reasons for everyone to get involved in call-out culture. Last year we won ground on making people convert from "master" to "main" in their Git repos, and this year we show the world how awesome software engineering is by never making sure our code contains Canadian jokes. Everyone knows that Canadians love having FOSS corrected to never ever include another Canadian joke amiright!
- transmogrifex 6y ago
  Or is that "amiroot"!
jhanschoo 6y ago
There are some important aspects of voiceism that the author does not address. There is indeed an aspect of prejudice and stereotyping, but accents and dialects intrinsically hinder communication to someone who is unfamiliar with them. We cannot expect everyone to be familiar with every accent and dialect, so we have General American and Received Pronunciation as standard accents (and Standard English), which helps communication especially with weak English speakers and ESL speakers. So for some examples mentioned > while we’re at it: can’t we let Steven Colbert speak in his natural South Carolina accent, or Don Lemon in the strains of his native Baton Rouge? As with bias against visible ethnic features (skin colour, the epicanthic fold typical of Asian people’s upper eyelids), exposure is all. from another perspective, using one's native accent on TV when they are perfectly capable of speaking in a more standard accent is arguably more supremacist than "antibigoted". There is a subtle but very important (wrt what is ethical) distinction between prejudice against one's native accent and dialect, and deciding instead to speak, or require to speak in a standard accent and dialect: the latter can be due to prejudicial pressures, but also often for mere intelligibility and comprehension, and I'm not confident that the author notices and appreciates the distinction.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  > There are some important aspects of voiceism that the author does not address. There is indeed an aspect of prejudice and stereotyping, but accents and dialects intrinsically hinder communication to someone who is unfamiliar with them. Perhaps if it be quite far off from one's own, but in many cases it does not hinder at all. As a more interesting example, consider that intelligent characters in U.S.A. cinema have a statistically high probability of having either a received pronunciation, or German accent, — given that the target audience is one of the U.S.A., one can assume that either, especially the latter, would hinder communication to at least some degree, however marginal. Yet, both accents impart upon the listener an impression of intelligence. This was even referenced in The Practice, in one scene, where a lawyer for his expert witness specifically picked an expert with an English accent, on his experience that an R.P. English accent leads to U.S.A. jurors' holding the expert more credible. I'm quite sceptical that communication is truly hampered in many of these cases. It is certainly not difficult by any margin to understand what Eliza Doolittle is saying in My Fair Lady, but the story of course highlights the absurd degree of accent discrimination that permeates British society.
tkgally 6y ago
This is a thoughtful, well-written article. A few additional comments: The author seems to be writing for a U.S. audience, so most of his examples come from North American English. Similar problems also exist, of course, in other English-speaking places and in other languages. People in Britain, for example, are famously sensitive to class and regional differences in speech. In Japanese (I live in Japan), regional accents and dialects can vary greatly and are also sometimes associated with prejudice and discrimination. For some languages, a national government might try to fix the pronunciation, grammar, and orthography of a “standard” language. In the 19th century in Japan, there was a partially successful government-led attempt to make a version of Tokyo Japanese standard; school textbooks and, later, the national broadcaster NHK mostly adopted that dialect. The government has also influenced how Japanese is written; the forms of many kanji that now appear in Unicode, for example, were originally decided by government fiat after World War II. One interesting aspect of American English is that notions of what constitutes “standard” American English—including even spelling—have formed largely independent of the government. Publishers, broadcasters, educators, and a variety of complex social forces have had much greater influence.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  I think a similarly important distinction is that in the U.S.A., the prestige accent, General American, is truly neutral territory that is is not a specific regional accent of any place, — it would be quite normal for even a homeless man to speak it, at any place throughout the U.S.A.,, which would not sound usual. The U.K.'s relationship with Received Pronunciation is very different: it is the native regional accent of the rich elite of London, and consequently it would be quite unusual for a homeless man on the streets of Liverpool to speak it. At the very least, General American is an accent that can be spoken without revealing anything of one's birthplace and social situation. A man speaking R.P. reveals his wealth and upbringing around London to a greater degree. The Finnish situation, for comparison, is that the standard language is spoken by about no one informally, and is a practically constructed languages that was created by the government by combining the most conservative elements of all dialects. — it is the native language of no one, so it is even more neutral territory than G.A., yielding kno one an unfair advantage.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
> This is one reason that I only semi-facetiously say that, to the many forms of prejudice we’ve all been alerted to (racism, sexism, ageism, lookism), we should add “voiceism,” a coinage that refers to the destructive stereotypes and preconceptions triggered by the way people sound when they speak. We should add an infinite list to that. The truth of the matter is that few men care as much about “discrimination” or “præjudice” as they say they do. Rather, they only care when it's based on whatever category they've arbitrarily taken an interest in. Yes, accent is one of those that often goes unnoticed, so is height, æsthetic value of one's face, haircut, depth of one's voice, and an endless lists of things I can mention. That the auctor of this article focuses on accent in particular, suggests a particular interest in accent above al the others.
beeforpork 6y ago
“a language where nobody knows how to conjugate the verbs.” minä nauran - ich lache - I laugh sinä naurat - Du lachst - you laugh me nauramme - wir lachen - we laugh te nauratte - ihr lacht - you laugh he nauravat - sie lachen - they laugh hän nauraa - sie lacht - she laughs(!) To speakers of other languages than English, this is a weird way of insulting an English dialect.
- bradrn 6y ago
  Not only that, the more you learn about other languages, the more weird than ‘insult’ becomes! Some representative examples from outside Europe: (Murik) g-a-kərə-na 3P.NUM-1S.ERG-hit-PRS ‘I hit them’ n-umbwa-ŋa-kərə-ŋa-na INV-3P.ERG-1S.ACC-hit-INV-PRS ‘They hit me’ (Yimas) ma-mp-nanaŋ-yawra-kia-na-ntut 3S.ACC-3D.ERG-DUR-gather-NIGHT-DUR-RM.PST ‘They both were getting it during the night’ (All examples from The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area. And yes, all those are single words.) And it gets even worse… pity the poor language learner who wants to conjugate verbs in Isirawa: SG.M SG.F DU PL 3PL ‘kill’ sən sin nonɪn trevrun trevroun ‘give’ vrɪn vrun ninɪn rirɪn nəniyəun ‘see’ maun main makaun marɪn maun (Foley says ‘The accretions that individual verb roots take to form stems seems unpredictable’, which to me seems to be putting the situation mildly!) And, on the other extreme, there’s plenty of perfectly respectable languages with no inflection whatsoever, making the ‘insult’ even weirder. Lao, for example: kap² maa² maø laang⁴ tiin³ laang⁴ mùù² … go.back come DIR.ALL wash foot wash hand … ‘[We’d] come back and wash [our] feet, [and] wash [our] hands, … … qanaa²maj² lèkaø khùn⁵ tiang³ tii³ kaleeng¹ nòòn² … clean.up C.LNK ascend bed hit bell sleep … clean up, and then get into bed, [when they’d] ring the bell to go to sleep.’ (Source: Enfield’s A grammar of Lao)
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    And pity even more so the one who has a language where all words have declension. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension
bicchiere 6y ago
NO. You guys in north American culture have to much problems about being addressed. I mean, ofc racism is very bad ( In any form and regard every aspect of the different race ). But come on, part of staying alive and being mature is just accept the differences.

52 points by Vigier 6y ago

I fully admit to an amount of voicism when dealing with recruiters who’ve either emigrated from or are in a call center in India. Many times, I simply can’t parse their English due to their accents, to the point where I just don’t respond to them, either in a phone call or even email (because they might call). Sad, but true.

samsari 6y ago
This isn't something I'd be happy admitting to. What steps have you taken so far to address this?
- curiousgal 6y ago
  I am not a native English speaker, why is it OP's responsibility to decipher what the recruiters are saying? It is their responsibility to master the language and to express themselves clearly.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    Those recruiters most likely have "mastered the language" and are expressing themselves clearly, just in a different accent. If someone interacts with Indian English speakers often enough that they develop a habit of avoiding Indians just in case they might call and speak with an accent they can't understand, it's probably time to do something about that, like getting more exposure in an environment where it's easier to understand (e.g. with subtitles) In the case of recruiting, where there's no obligation to pay any attention to recruiters at all, it might not be much of an issue, but it's only a matter of time until you get an Indian colleague and avoiding them is no longer an option.
    - harperlee 6y ago
      There is a big gap between being functional in a language and perfecting it. Each sound cue not mastered hinders information redundancy and thus increases risk of not being understood. It probably seems like percolation: small crevices that suddenly reach a critical point where comprehension is lost at the receiver side. Also way before that point, the receiver needs more subconscious effort and thus fatigues itself parsing the message.
  - lurtbancaster 6y ago
    It's the responsibility of both the OP's *and* the recruiters. We've societally conditioned ourselves through media that persons with certain accents - cough a very specific kind of British accent cough, are more "sophisticated", and a very specific kind of Southern USA accent as "unsophisticated"; even though logically, the manner in which a person speaks should neither validate nor invalidate the substance of what is being spoken. But implicit bias affects us all and so we have voicism. If we really want to break down voicism monetarily, it's a suboptimal way to work. It makes it more likely that you might reject a good idea because the person who expressed it didn't have the dialect/accent with which you're most familiar. Likewise it makes it more likely you might let a less-than-good idea or a straight-up bad idea get through your filter, because it's been expressed in an accent/dialect you've come to associate with "pleasurable". The OP is self-aware enough to know that this bias exists within them. This is already better than those who might reject any notions of such biases at play. The OP could, for example, to remediate this bias, watch YouTube videos where English is spoken by those from that given region. Whatever this "region" might be. This would help reduce the cognitive burden of parsing accents during any future interactions. So that your brain would be less focussed on the peculiarities of the accent and more focussed on *what* they're actually saying. It would make establishing rapport easier. It's just a better way to work. But like with most things though, practice makes perfect. Also personally I find it fascinating to listen to people speak the same language differently. So it's a fun cognitive exercise to train your mind to ignore the accent and listen to what they're saying. On to the recruiters-side now. Sometimes it's not just unfamiliar accents/dialects, for which they're not at fault whatsoever. Sometimes it's straight-up poor sentencing structure and grammatical errors. And that is obviously not the OP's fault. And is definitely the recruiters' fault. The recruiters stand to gain a lot from being able to express themselves more clearly. But language skill is a much more fundamental problem to address, that's endemic to the educational system and curriculum of that area. There's very little the OP could do, or any one person could do, to remedy that. To summarize, the barrier to de-biasing the OP is, at this moment, much lower than the barrier to fixing deficits in language skills of an entire people in any given region. Obviously things will need fixing from both sides, but let's try to fix what's relatively easy to fix first I guess.
pmiller2 6y ago
I wonder if maybe you're not being taken the right way in this thread. I've personally had a few experiences with professors, both in undergrad and grad school, in which I found them hard to understand because of their accents. Rather than dropping the class and complaining about that "foreign professor," I stuck it out and spent significant effort into trying to parse their language, because I knew there were a significant number of things I could learn from these people. What's more, they were actually people to me; I physically interacted with them multiple times a week, every week for a semester or more. If I were cold called by some random recruiter with a thick accent with whom I had no previous relationship, I can't say as I'd put the same amount of effort into trying to understand them. They aren't people I interact with on a near daily basis, and they probably don't have anything interesting to offer me, so I tend toward feeling it's not worth the effort to try and force my brain to hear the message through the accent. Although the Indian call center recruiter is a common stereotype, the thing is, I'd apply the same sort of logic with any accent, in just about any situation I can think of. That is, if the interaction is potentially significant, I'm inclined to expend effort. If they're people I'll be interacting with frequently, I'm also inclined to spend the effort. I've encountered Indian people I couldn't easily understand. I've also encountered Chinese, American, European, and South American people I had difficulty understanding. In each case, I applied the same logic to determine whether I would expend brainpower on understanding their literal words to get at what they were saying. Is this closer to what you meant to say?
drivingmenuts 6y ago
I will note that, in person, I don’t usually have a problem understanding Indians. I think maybe those I’ve worked with have had more time with the idioms of American English and practice at reducing their accent.
boruto 6y ago
I am an Indian, I struggled to understand Russian and Ukrainian people. After spending an year, I basically speak like them.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "Not great, not terrible?" :)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

transmogrifex 6y ago

This is excellent. Everyone knows that the best way to bring about better engineering in future is to introduce more reasons for everyone to get involved in call-out culture. Last year we won ground on making people convert from "master" to "main" in their Git repos, and this year we show the world how awesome software engineering is by never making sure our code contains Canadian jokes. Everyone knows that Canadians love having FOSS corrected to never ever include another Canadian joke amiright!

transmogrifex 6y ago
Or is that "amiroot"!

jhanschoo 6y ago

There are some important aspects of voiceism that the author does not address. There is indeed an aspect of prejudice and stereotyping, but accents and dialects intrinsically hinder communication to someone who is unfamiliar with them. We cannot expect everyone to be familiar with every accent and dialect, so we have General American and Received Pronunciation as standard accents (and Standard English), which helps communication especially with weak English speakers and ESL speakers. So for some examples mentioned > while we’re at it: can’t we let Steven Colbert speak in his natural South Carolina accent, or Don Lemon in the strains of his native Baton Rouge? As with bias against visible ethnic features (skin colour, the epicanthic fold typical of Asian people’s upper eyelids), exposure is all. from another perspective, using one's native accent on TV when they are perfectly capable of speaking in a more standard accent is arguably more supremacist than "antibigoted". There is a subtle but very important (wrt what is ethical) distinction between prejudice against one's native accent and dialect, and deciding instead to speak, or require to speak in a standard accent and dialect: the latter can be due to prejudicial pressures, but also often for mere intelligibility and comprehension, and I'm not confident that the author notices and appreciates the distinction.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
> There are some important aspects of voiceism that the author does not address. There is indeed an aspect of prejudice and stereotyping, but accents and dialects intrinsically hinder communication to someone who is unfamiliar with them. Perhaps if it be quite far off from one's own, but in many cases it does not hinder at all. As a more interesting example, consider that intelligent characters in U.S.A. cinema have a statistically high probability of having either a received pronunciation, or German accent, — given that the target audience is one of the U.S.A., one can assume that either, especially the latter, would hinder communication to at least some degree, however marginal. Yet, both accents impart upon the listener an impression of intelligence. This was even referenced in The Practice, in one scene, where a lawyer for his expert witness specifically picked an expert with an English accent, on his experience that an R.P. English accent leads to U.S.A. jurors' holding the expert more credible. I'm quite sceptical that communication is truly hampered in many of these cases. It is certainly not difficult by any margin to understand what Eliza Doolittle is saying in My Fair Lady, but the story of course highlights the absurd degree of accent discrimination that permeates British society.

tkgally 6y ago

This is a thoughtful, well-written article. A few additional comments: The author seems to be writing for a U.S. audience, so most of his examples come from North American English. Similar problems also exist, of course, in other English-speaking places and in other languages. People in Britain, for example, are famously sensitive to class and regional differences in speech. In Japanese (I live in Japan), regional accents and dialects can vary greatly and are also sometimes associated with prejudice and discrimination. For some languages, a national government might try to fix the pronunciation, grammar, and orthography of a “standard” language. In the 19th century in Japan, there was a partially successful government-led attempt to make a version of Tokyo Japanese standard; school textbooks and, later, the national broadcaster NHK mostly adopted that dialect. The government has also influenced how Japanese is written; the forms of many kanji that now appear in Unicode, for example, were originally decided by government fiat after World War II. One interesting aspect of American English is that notions of what constitutes “standard” American English—including even spelling—have formed largely independent of the government. Publishers, broadcasters, educators, and a variety of complex social forces have had much greater influence.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
I think a similarly important distinction is that in the U.S.A., the prestige accent, General American, is truly neutral territory that is is not a specific regional accent of any place, — it would be quite normal for even a homeless man to speak it, at any place throughout the U.S.A.,, which would not sound usual. The U.K.'s relationship with Received Pronunciation is very different: it is the native regional accent of the rich elite of London, and consequently it would be quite unusual for a homeless man on the streets of Liverpool to speak it. At the very least, General American is an accent that can be spoken without revealing anything of one's birthplace and social situation. A man speaking R.P. reveals his wealth and upbringing around London to a greater degree. The Finnish situation, for comparison, is that the standard language is spoken by about no one informally, and is a practically constructed languages that was created by the government by combining the most conservative elements of all dialects. — it is the native language of no one, so it is even more neutral territory than G.A., yielding kno one an unfair advantage.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

> This is one reason that I only semi-facetiously say that, to the many forms of prejudice we’ve all been alerted to (racism, sexism, ageism, lookism), we should add “voiceism,” a coinage that refers to the destructive stereotypes and preconceptions triggered by the way people sound when they speak. We should add an infinite list to that. The truth of the matter is that few men care as much about “discrimination” or “præjudice” as they say they do. Rather, they only care when it's based on whatever category they've arbitrarily taken an interest in. Yes, accent is one of those that often goes unnoticed, so is height, æsthetic value of one's face, haircut, depth of one's voice, and an endless lists of things I can mention. That the auctor of this article focuses on accent in particular, suggests a particular interest in accent above al the others.

beeforpork 6y ago

“a language where nobody knows how to conjugate the verbs.” minä nauran - ich lache - I laugh sinä naurat - Du lachst - you laugh me nauramme - wir lachen - we laugh te nauratte - ihr lacht - you laugh he nauravat - sie lachen - they laugh hän nauraa - sie lacht - she laughs(!) To speakers of other languages than English, this is a weird way of insulting an English dialect.

bradrn 6y ago
Not only that, the more you learn about other languages, the more weird than ‘insult’ becomes! Some representative examples from outside Europe: (Murik) g-a-kərə-na 3P.NUM-1S.ERG-hit-PRS ‘I hit them’ n-umbwa-ŋa-kərə-ŋa-na INV-3P.ERG-1S.ACC-hit-INV-PRS ‘They hit me’ (Yimas) ma-mp-nanaŋ-yawra-kia-na-ntut 3S.ACC-3D.ERG-DUR-gather-NIGHT-DUR-RM.PST ‘They both were getting it during the night’ (All examples from The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area. And yes, all those are single words.) And it gets even worse… pity the poor language learner who wants to conjugate verbs in Isirawa: SG.M SG.F DU PL 3PL ‘kill’ sən sin nonɪn trevrun trevroun ‘give’ vrɪn vrun ninɪn rirɪn nəniyəun ‘see’ maun main makaun marɪn maun (Foley says ‘The accretions that individual verb roots take to form stems seems unpredictable’, which to me seems to be putting the situation mildly!) And, on the other extreme, there’s plenty of perfectly respectable languages with no inflection whatsoever, making the ‘insult’ even weirder. Lao, for example: kap² maa² maø laang⁴ tiin³ laang⁴ mùù² … go.back come DIR.ALL wash foot wash hand … ‘[We’d] come back and wash [our] feet, [and] wash [our] hands, … … qanaa²maj² lèkaø khùn⁵ tiang³ tii³ kaleeng¹ nòòn² … clean.up C.LNK ascend bed hit bell sleep … clean up, and then get into bed, [when they’d] ring the bell to go to sleep.’ (Source: Enfield’s A grammar of Lao)
- cercatrova 6y ago
  And pity even more so the one who has a language where all words have declension. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

bicchiere 6y ago

NO. You guys in north American culture have to much problems about being addressed. I mean, ofc racism is very bad ( In any form and regard every aspect of the different race ). But come on, part of staying alive and being mature is just accept the differences.