Accented Speech Acts

Among all the negative stereotypes that plague the image of the foreigner, the complaint about the alienness of the foreigner's mother tongue is a typical one. In one of his seminars on hospitality, Jacques Derrida compares the foreigner to the sophist, saying that “it is as though the Foreigner were appearing under an aspect that makes you think of a sophist, of someone whom the city or the State is going to treat as a sophist: someone who doesn't speak like the rest, someone who speaks an odd sort of language” (Derrida 2000, 5). The mother tongue of the foreigner is seen as a linguistic veil that isolates the speaker and masks his or her transparency. At the same time, to be a foreigner means to uproot the mother tongue and graft it onto a new language. The non-native accent, as a symptom of “transplant rejection,” thus appears as a “defensive reaction” of a tongue whose “immune system” alerts the speaker to the invasion of alien and potentially harmful substances. Thus, to the foreigner, the accented tongue is at once the veil and the revealer, the protection and the obstacle.

One of the definitions of “accent” given in the Oxford English Dictionary reads: “A way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual.”