I find the sensitivity on this topic regarding racism kind of overshadowing the practical aspect of not being able to understand what the other person is saying.
We offer people in our company English language training, because we’re a world wide remote company and everyone should be able to understand each other. Is this racism as well?
This sounds like a severe deficiency in your team, but it's not hard for you to learn to handle other accents.
Learned helplessness is not an excuse.
Do you even realize just how special it is that English is the defacto standard language and that this happens to work? And now you’re saying it’s realistic for everyone to also learn all different accents of every country?
You do realize that Filipinos have difficulty understanding Indians and vice versa? Should they both be completely comfortable with each others’ accents, rather than a single standard way to pronounce things?
This is such a ridiculous take.
No of course we don’t, and neither do we offer one with a more Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Thai or German accent. This is because we decided upon American-English as the language, which is also reflected in the grammar choices on our website (despite being a French company).
The courses are entirely optional. Some colleagues don’t take them, and they have problems communicating with customers, which is very frustrating. I’ve had an Indian manager of a customer complain that one of our Thai support engineers was incomprehensible, and my boss complain that this Indian manager was incomprehensible. It’s just a mess all around.
I’m Dutch myself and these languages courses have benefited me a lot to remove some of my Dutch accent, which helps during business conversations. I’ve traveled the world pretty much constantly over the past 12 years, so I’m quite tolerant of many types of accents, but even just arriving in the Philippines for the first time last week required some recalibration, because they have their own way of pronouncing things.
We all know what this is about. We’ve all had CS calls with accent friction.
What’s the point of using word games to sidestep a problem and the discussion of a real-world implementation of a solution?
Language is useful insofar as it lets you communicate, and if you lack the phonemes the meaning of your words will be misinterpreted and misunderstood. Learning a more common accent is a reality that has incredible utility and is not in itself racist. At any rate, there's enough variation between the English commonly spoken by Philippinos that it's considered a dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_English.
