The Sound of You: Shame, Pride, and Belonging

The first time someone asked me to repeat myself because they couldn’t understand my English, I felt something shrivel inside my chest—a sudden awareness that my mouth was betraying me, that the words emerging from my tongue carried unwanted information about where I came from, who I was, how I might be categorized by listeners who knew nothing else about me.

An accent is autobiography written in sound—and sometimes that story feels like evidence against you.

I was nineteen, newly arrived in Dhaka for university, proud of my English until a classmate from an international school looked puzzled when I answered a question in class. “Sorry, what?” she said, not cruelly but with genuine confusion, and I realized my rural Bengali accent was coloring my English in ways that marked me as different, less sophisticated, perhaps less intelligent.

The way we speak becomes the way others see us, whether we choose it or not.

Accent shame is the internalization of other people’s geography.

I began listening to BBC radio obsessively, trying to train my mouth to produce sounds that would disguise my origins. I practiced speaking in empty rooms, recording myself, erasing the musical patterns of my childhood Bengali that kept creeping into my English pronunciation.

We try to sand away the rough edges of our authenticity to fit into smoother social spaces.

The cruelest part was realizing I was ashamed of sounds that carried my mother’s voice, my father’s inflections, the linguistic DNA of everyone who had taught me to speak. My accent wasn’t just personal quirk—it was ancestral inheritance, the accumulated music of generations of voices that had shaped my tongue.

To be ashamed of your accent is to be ashamed of your people’s way of making meaning from air.

In Bangladesh, speaking English with a Bengali accent marks you as local. Speaking Bengali with an English accent marks you as foreign. There’s no neutral territory.

My son, growing up in Dhaka but attending an English-medium school, navigates this differently. His English carries no trace of village origins, no hint of economic struggle, no evidence of the linguistic journey his parents made. He speaks like someone born into privilege, and sometimes I feel grateful for this protective camouflage.

But what does he lose when his voice carries no trace of his family’s history?

I listen to him speak Bengali with his friends and notice how it’s infected with English rhythms, how certain concepts can only be expressed in English even when the conversation is primarily Bengali. He’s developing a hybrid accent that belongs fully to neither language, a linguistic identity that reflects his generation’s cultural position—between worlds, between languages, between ways of being Bangladeshi.

Accent discrimination is one of the few remaining socially acceptable forms of prejudice.

People who would never comment on someone’s skin color feel free to imitate, mock, or express frustration with accents. “I can’t understand a word they’re saying,” becomes socially acceptable criticism, as if the speaker’s pronunciation is more important than their message.

We’ve confused clarity with conformity, comprehension with cultural familiarity.

I’ve watched colleagues diminish their own expertise by apologizing for their accents before making presentations. Brilliant minds prefacing their insights with “Sorry for my English,” as if the valuable content they’re about to share is somehow lessened by the particular way their mouth shapes vowels.

We’ve learned to discount our own intelligence based on other people’s listening habits.

But accents carry information that “standard” pronunciation erases.

When I hear someone speak English with a heavy Bengali accent, I know they’ve lived multiple linguistic lives, navigated complex cultural translations, possessed the courage to express themselves in a language they didn’t grow up with. Their accent isn’t evidence of limitation—it’s evidence of expansion.

Every accent tells a story of geographical journey, cultural crossing, the brave decision to speak despite imperfection.

My mother spoke English with such a thick Bengali accent that strangers often couldn’t understand her. But her accent carried the music of her mother tongue, the rhythms of a worldview that English grammar couldn’t fully contain. When she died, that particular way of speaking English died with her—a unique fusion of languages that had existed only in her mouth.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to eliminate accents but to expand our capacity to hear across difference.

I’m learning to hear accents as music rather than mistakes, as evidence of complexity rather than inadequacy. The Bengali doctor speaking English with subcontinental rhythms, the Chinese engineer whose tonal patterns color her consonants, the American expatriate whose flat vowels stand out in Dhaka conversations—we’re all doing the beautiful, impossible work of cross-cultural communication.

In a globalized world, accented English isn’t deviation from a standard—it’s the new standard.

What stories does your accent tell? What journeys does your pronunciation reveal? And what would change if we learned to hear accents not as barriers to understanding but as evidence of the human capacity to learn, adapt, and communicate across the boundaries that separate us?

The shame isn’t in having an accent—everyone has an accent. The shame is in believing that some ways of making meaning with our mouths are more valuable than others, when every accent carries the irreplaceable music of human experience shaped by place, time, and the particular way our people learned to turn breath into words.