Fake accents can make your company larger
Nury Vittachi , Bangkok | Sun, 04/18/2010 10:09 AM | Opinion
Sneaky bosses are making workers adopt weird accents to make companies sound larger than they are. “In my first job the company was so small, only three workers,” said one reader who did not want his name printed. “Sometimes I had an Indian accent, sometimes British, sometimes Romanian.” What’s a Romanian accent sound like? “We didn’t know what Romanians sounded like, so we just made it up,” he said.
One reader claims to have learned to speak English with a Na’vi accent, the language of the blue aliens from the movie Avatar. Thinks: Hmm. Are people in the corporate world impressed by a firm which employs fictional characters?
The cheekiest case was from a guy who gave his company a big-sounding name, something like Megacorp Multi-Global (Asia-Pacific) Inc. But in fact it existed only as a second SIM card in his mobile phone.
When the phone rang, he replied in an Indian accent, to make the caller think he had outsourced reception duties to a Hyderabad call-center: “MMG. Thanking you for your calling. Here is trading-wala’s reception. I putting you through to main office.” He sways his head from side to side as he talks to make himself sound more Indian.
He then puts the caller on hold briefly before re-answering in a Scottish accent. “Jest wait a wee moment, Jimmy.” Back on hold goes the caller until he re-answers in an Australian accent: “G’day, mate, so, what can I do yer for?”
But switching between accents comes with risk. Reader Jason Sydon says he is now so confused that he has lost control of his accent. “When I arrive at work, I often begin the day with an Irish accent, progressing within an hour onto Scottish. It’s not something I seem to be able to control,” he said.
Christy Chiang, a Hong Kong teenager studying Arabic, finds herself speaking English with a Middle-Eastern accent. Her Middle-Eastern lecturer finds himself using L for N in Cantonese style, pronouncing “knowledge” as “lolledge”.
On a related subject, your humble narrator received an email from an Indian police officer (who gave his name as Inspector Singh). He who complained that he had woken up with a B-movie-style Italian accent. “I tink i gotta Italiano disease! I cannot-a stop-a talkin’ a-like-a-dis. Mamma mia.”
Oddly enough this was followed by a message from someone with precisely the opposite problem. The email, signed Silvio Berlusconi, said: “Aiyo! I am waking up this morning with an Indian accent. What I am going to do? This is being most inconvenient, what with me being prime minister of Italy. And where’s the peon with my lunch? You can’t be getting good staffs these days. Where’s my jelabi?”
It’s clear that Foreign Accent Syndrome, a real disease, is continuing to spread. This is good news
for bosses who can just sack even more staff.
I just hope no one tells the bosses in this part of the world about Amy Walker, a young British woman who can do almost any accent in the world more or less perfectly (look her up on YouTube). We could launch an Asian equivalent of BBC World Service Radio and just employ her to do everything. This is actually not a bad idea.
The writer is a columnist and journalist.
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