This isn’t an easy question, but I think it’s valuable enough to ask. How easily do non-British-Isles people understand Will’s speech?
Tick → you struggle to understand it Cross → you understand it fine
I think this is both a delicate topic and something that seems reasonable to ask. I don’t love that I am discussing a hugely over-scrutinised person’s accent, but equally, if it turns out that Will’s comprehensibility could be improved, valuable to know. Nor is this really a Will thing, we could all work on our comprehensibility. It’s just that only 1 of us is on Trevor Noah.
Mostly, lets see what the non-British-Isles community actually thinks. Hopefully, this gets x-voted into oblivion.
Editing notes. The original text was a bit blunter and I felt bad. Feel free to downvote it if you think it was a bad question in general. Thanks to Karthik for the challenge. Also I wanted to give people a way to vote on the substance of the issue. The tick and cross are the other way round so that if people say they understand him fine, I’m punished for asking the question in the first place.
I understand this is a question in good faith that is concerned about comprehensibility. Nonetheless, I downvoted because I think this form of discussion is generally bad. I don’t think it’s okay for us to tell people—even community leaders like Will—how they should sound, no more than we should opine on how they look. The New Yorker profile has examples of how weird this can get, with Will asking his friends if he should get dental surgery to be a more appealing public figure. Discussing how to engineer a person into the perfect PR machine has limits.
I understand that comprehensibility is important. But the overlap with accent is not that large—comprehensibility is also about diction, pace, modulation, command over language, etc.
Agreed. I don’t think these questions should be off limits, but it’s good to be thoughtful and remember there’s a real person at the other end who probably has his own views about his voice, appearance etc—this isn’t a theoretical optimisation problem!
I guess I disagree that personal branding isn’t real and a choice. People make choices about their presentation all the time. I think the question is more whether this is a reasonable question to ask in public. I’m open to the idea that it isn’t.
I just don’t think an accent is identical to other forms of presentation. Accents are deeply personal and cultural. When I debated in high school for a non-indian audience, we were repeatedly told in euphemistic terms that our accents made us less “compelling”. It was deeply demoralizing to know that not being from Eton made us worse to listen to, and I know people who consciously changed their accent because of it.
Now that my accent has become Americanized after years of living in the US, it is genuinely painful and isolating to meet Indian people who think I grew up in the US because of my Americanized accent. I have lost something of my connection to India because of my accent change. I listen to myself and I sometimes wonder who the hell is speaking.
Sidenote: since you’ve essentially removed the original comment, some of the context has been lost. In particular the thing that ticked me off the most was not you saying that some people might not understand Will, but that his accent “might be something to work on”.
American, find it easy to understand. Evidence that this isn’t a large problem: the movie Shrek chose to use a Scottish accent for it’s main character.
I think his accent might actually have the effect of being a draw due to the novelty for Americans. Plus it then additionally forces a listener to listen more closely if they cant follow as easily—and it is hardly a bad thing for your audience to be paying more close attention to you if you’re making nuanced arguments.
But I’m just projecting my own experience here, probably.
Apart from a few things (rs) I actually think his accent might be phonetically closer to an American accent than most UK accents. It didn’t seem hard to understand.
I have some difficulty in understanding Will’s accent (as an American who grew up in the northeast—New Hampshire), though notably less difficulty than plenty of Americans who aren’t as articulate. Specfically, I listened to WWOTF at 2x speed and I struggled to hear everything. I know I can easily comprehend other voices at the same wpm, but with Will I was missing occasional words and it took until the second half of the book before I felt I was really hearing everything. I wished they had gone with a professional narrator for selfish reasons, though I understood the motivation behind Will narrating it himself. (At 1x speed I have the same issues with Will’s voice, except my brain has more time to process and figure out what word he said based on context, so it’s not an issue.).
heavily edited
This isn’t an easy question, but I think it’s valuable enough to ask. How easily do non-British-Isles people understand Will’s speech?
Tick → you struggle to understand it
Cross → you understand it fine
I think this is both a delicate topic and something that seems reasonable to ask. I don’t love that I am discussing a hugely over-scrutinised person’s accent, but equally, if it turns out that Will’s comprehensibility could be improved, valuable to know. Nor is this really a Will thing, we could all work on our comprehensibility. It’s just that only 1 of us is on Trevor Noah.
Mostly, lets see what the non-British-Isles community actually thinks. Hopefully, this gets x-voted into oblivion.
Editing notes. The original text was a bit blunter and I felt bad. Feel free to downvote it if you think it was a bad question in general. Thanks to Karthik for the challenge. Also I wanted to give people a way to vote on the substance of the issue. The tick and cross are the other way round so that if people say they understand him fine, I’m punished for asking the question in the first place.
I understand this is a question in good faith that is concerned about comprehensibility. Nonetheless, I downvoted because I think this form of discussion is generally bad. I don’t think it’s okay for us to tell people—even community leaders like Will—how they should sound, no more than we should opine on how they look. The New Yorker profile has examples of how weird this can get, with Will asking his friends if he should get dental surgery to be a more appealing public figure. Discussing how to engineer a person into the perfect PR machine has limits.
I understand that comprehensibility is important. But the overlap with accent is not that large—comprehensibility is also about diction, pace, modulation, command over language, etc.
Agreed. I don’t think these questions should be off limits, but it’s good to be thoughtful and remember there’s a real person at the other end who probably has his own views about his voice, appearance etc—this isn’t a theoretical optimisation problem!
Any thoughts on my edited version?
Ha, it’s probably over the top the other way now, but seems fine!
I made some edits. Thank you for the challenge.
I guess I disagree that personal branding isn’t real and a choice. People make choices about their presentation all the time. I think the question is more whether this is a reasonable question to ask in public. I’m open to the idea that it isn’t.
I just don’t think an accent is identical to other forms of presentation. Accents are deeply personal and cultural. When I debated in high school for a non-indian audience, we were repeatedly told in euphemistic terms that our accents made us less “compelling”. It was deeply demoralizing to know that not being from Eton made us worse to listen to, and I know people who consciously changed their accent because of it.
Now that my accent has become Americanized after years of living in the US, it is genuinely painful and isolating to meet Indian people who think I grew up in the US because of my Americanized accent. I have lost something of my connection to India because of my accent change. I listen to myself and I sometimes wonder who the hell is speaking.
Sidenote: since you’ve essentially removed the original comment, some of the context has been lost. In particular the thing that ticked me off the most was not you saying that some people might not understand Will, but that his accent “might be something to work on”.
American, find it easy to understand. Evidence that this isn’t a large problem: the movie Shrek chose to use a Scottish accent for it’s main character.
I think his accent might actually have the effect of being a draw due to the novelty for Americans. Plus it then additionally forces a listener to listen more closely if they cant follow as easily—and it is hardly a bad thing for your audience to be paying more close attention to you if you’re making nuanced arguments.
But I’m just projecting my own experience here, probably.
Apart from a few things (rs) I actually think his accent might be phonetically closer to an American accent than most UK accents. It didn’t seem hard to understand.
I am much less confident this is a comment worth making given people have voted as much. I, therefore, retract it. Oops/sorry.
I’m not a native speaker and found his accent very easy to understand. But yeah, info on Americans might be valuable.
I have some difficulty in understanding Will’s accent (as an American who grew up in the northeast—New Hampshire), though notably less difficulty than plenty of Americans who aren’t as articulate. Specfically, I listened to WWOTF at 2x speed and I struggled to hear everything. I know I can easily comprehend other voices at the same wpm, but with Will I was missing occasional words and it took until the second half of the book before I felt I was really hearing everything. I wished they had gone with a professional narrator for selfish reasons, though I understood the motivation behind Will narrating it himself. (At 1x speed I have the same issues with Will’s voice, except my brain has more time to process and figure out what word he said based on context, so it’s not an issue.).