Passion For Reason : Job discrimination against 'thick Filipino accent'
Raul Pangalangan
Inquirer News Service
THIS week, "Linggo ng Wika" [Language Week], we celebrate our national language, Filipino, as the most honest expression of the Filipino soul, fully knowing that it is not the most effective idiom for competing in the global market. In the age of business outsourcing, "call centers" and the export of migrant labor, English proficiency is our comparative advantage.
Along the way, another tongue has actually emerged: Filipino English. Homegrown Filipinos may not be aware of it, but the US Supreme Court sometime ago upheld the non-hiring of an otherwise excellent job applicant because of his heavy Filipino accent in Fragante v. City and County of Honolulu, in a decision handed down in 1990.
Fragante was a combat veteran who fought as a guerrilla against the Japanese and served a 23-month tour of duty in Vietnam. He retired from the Philippine military, became a naturalized American, and applied for a job with the Department of Motor Vehicles and Licensing. A US law professor described him thus: "Horatio Alger gained fame writing about men like Manuel Fragante, who faced adversity with resilience, self-reliance, intelligence and hard work."
Fragante topped the written examinations. But as soon as he entered the interview room, the interviewers were floored by his "very pronounced accent which is difficult to understand." He wasn't hired.
He filed suit under US civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion and national origin. He would construe accent as a "proxy criterion" for "national origin," because accent is nearly immutable -- at a certain age, you simply can't shake it off, try hard as you may -- and is functionally equivalent to discrimination on the basis of foreign origin.
But the courts held that his thick accent affected his job performance. Oral ability to communicate was a legitimate job qualification, and was therefore not discriminatory. Just by way of example, if you imagine the voice of your typical "atorni" in that context ("Ay eeem rreedi tu prrusid, yurrrahhnar"), perhaps he would have to repeat himself just to be understood, and might take twice as long to accomplish the same work as those who spoke in more familiar accents.
The irony was that during the trial, Fragante testified for two straight days in English, in nearly perfect grammar and syntax. His counsel had argued that it wasn't a question of "linguistic deviation"; if he wasn't easily understood, it was because his hearers automatically tuned off as soon as they detected his accent. It wasn't that his tongue wouldn't cooperate, but that other people's ears-and minds-closed up when they heard him. His ineffectiveness at his job lay, not in the stubbornness of his tongue, but in the callousness of his listeners' hearts. When "listener prejudice" is seen as a neutral test for job effectiveness, the court ratifies and becomes an instrument, an extension, of other people's biases.
But Filipinos shouldn't be surprised that language is more than just a way of talking, but a way of fixing a pecking order. Historians tell us, for instance, that the national hero Emilio Jacinto, who rebelled against Spain, actually affected a Spanish accent in speaking Tagalog as a young man, a mark of his being better educated than his peers.
So, before you demonize Fragante's tormentors, first admit that back here at home, we inflict and endure "listener prejudice" among ourselves. All of us speak English with an accent, yet there is a hierarchy even among those accents. Where is it written that a Manila accent is superior to an Ilocano accent? Both are equally foreign-sounding to native English speakers, whether British, American, or Australian. Teachers and job recruiters favor students who speak in the confident accent of the classy Catholic schools, and pick on those who sound "promdi" [provincial]. Yet this distinction has nothing to do with the language itself; it has all to do with our own local, class-based bigotry.
Irony of ironies, the burgeoning job market for call centers in Manila seeks American-sounding natives. These centers have apparently brought accent-conditioning to the level of a science, which should weaken Fragante's argument about accent immutability. Consider finally those telephone companies that advertise international long distance with Filipino operators. Would the job vacancy say "Genuine Filipino accent only"? (The foolproof test is to make job applicants read the vacancy notice. If they say "jinwayn," they're in!) Perhaps for certain jobs, an accent requirement is no different from a language requirement-you need a Spanish speaker to translate "Noli Me Tangere," a connoisseur of Filipino English to ask, "Collect ho ba 'to?"
When I was a student activist at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon cityC I noticed that activists who had hitherto spoken English regularly, suddenly stopped or tried to sound as "authentic" as possible, rolling their r's and blunting their short a's. It just wasn't politically correct otherwise. I couldn't have imagined that decades later it would be economically necessary and academically indispensable in the Philippines to speak the colonizer's language in the colonizer's style.
Language then is not just about power. For the poor bright kid who dreams of one day landing a well-paying job at a call center, it is about dreams. Learning English, for him, can very well make the difference between languishing in the same slum where he came from, and moving onward to a bright world where toilets don't stink, people say "Good morning" to one another, and yes, a decent paycheck awaits every payday. I will not begrudge him his dreams.
