Artificial intelligence and the end of dialects

it all started, As these things often do, with Instagram advertising. “No one tells you this if you’re an immigrant, but accent discrimination is real,” a woman said in the video. Her own accent is a weak Eastern European one, so it took me a few playbacks to notice it.

The ad was for BoldVoice, an AI-powered “dialect training” app. A few clicks led me to Accent Oracle, which promised to guess my native language. After reading a long phrase, the algorithm announced: “You have a Korean accent, my friend.” arrogant. But it’s impressive. I’m actually Korean.

I have lived in the United States for over a decade, and I am not only fluent in English. You can say that HyperFluent – My style, for example, is probably two standard deviations above the national average. But this still does not mean “citizen”. I learned English late enough to miss the crucial opportunity to acquire a native accent. It is a distinction that, depending on the era, can lead to certain complications. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites are said to have used the word “Shibbolet” to identify and slaughter fleeing Ephraimites, who were unable to pronounce the word “Shibbolet.” Sh Vote and say “sibboleth” instead. In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the killing of any Haitian who could not pronounce the Spanish word. Bergel (Parsley) in what became known as the Parsley Massacre.

So the stakes seemed high as Accent Oracle continued to listen to me speak, at one point scoring me 89 percent (“light accent”), and at another time 92 percent (“native or near-native”). The spread was alarming. On a bad day, I could have slaughtered. To improve my odds of survival, I signed up for a free one-week trial.

there The medium is the message quality of the accents. how When you say something it often reveals more about your origin, class, education or interests than it does What She says. In most societies, vocal mastery becomes a form of social capital.

As with everything else, AI is now the tone. Companies like Crisp and Sanas sell real-time accent “neutralization” for call center workers, making a Filipino agent’s voice more palatable to a customer in Ohio. The immediate reaction from the anti-AI camp was that this amounted to “digital whitewashing,” a capitulation to homogenized imperial Englishness. This is often framed as a racial issue, perhaps because ads for these services feature people of color and because call centers are located in places like India and the Philippines.

But that would be too hasty. Modifying speech for social benefit is an old story. Remember George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion– and its musical adaptation, My fair lady– Hinges on Henry Higgins’ reconstruction of Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney accent. Even the prominent German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte abandoned his Saxon accent when he moved to Jena, fearing that people would not take him seriously if he sounded rustic.

This is not a relic of the past. A 2022 British study found that the “accent status hierarchy” remains in place and has changed little since 1969, with a quarter of working adults reporting some form of accent discrimination at work, and nearly half of participants saying they had been ridiculed or mocked in social contexts.

In a Hacker News thread announcing the launch of BoldVoice, one commenter wrote: “I’d rather strive for a world where accents are less important than fixing accents.” Well, tell that to countless Koreans in this country who navigate the treacherous sonic gap in between shore and whore or coke and Rooster. This online comment was a feature of regular trash talk, the kind of unofficial moral high ground afforded only to a native English speaker or someone willfully ignorant of the daily indignities that non-native speakers face.