Is there such a thing as an Asian American accent? Nobody can quite nail it down — or agree whether it exists — but apparently you know it when you hear it.
The existence of an Asian American accent has been debated on social media, sparking conversations on TikTok and many a Reddit thread, including one devoted to celebrities who purportedly have it — Ali Wong, Randall Park and Lucy Liu.
Adam Aleksic, 23, a Serbian American linguistics content creator who is based in Barcelona, Spain, created the TikTok video that many users are riffing from to give examples of the accent. Aleksic cites studies that suggest Asian Americans speak with a higher pitch, or breathier articulation, but raises questions about which of the many Asian identities this accent could cover.
Everyone seems to agree that, if it exists, the Asian American accent is hard to define. It’s not that of first-generation immigrants; rather, it’s something in the speech of those who speak perfect English, but with a flavor that lets you know the speaker is of Asian descent.
“I super hear it! I have it myself despite having grown up in California since I was 2,” Howard Wang, a Northern Virginia-based political scientist who emigrated from Taiwan as an infant and grew up in a Taiwanese American enclave in Northern California, wrote in a direct message on X. He speaks with a standard American accent. Now in his early 30s, he described it as “subtle, like a midwestern accent.”
“People with the accent tend to be a little more nasal and to have shorter, more direct tones when speaking English as opposed to people without the accent, who seem to lilt in tone more,” Wang added, referring to the YouTuber Future Canoe as an extreme example.
Historian Carlos Yu described it in a tweet on X as “a shared timbre and manner of enunciation among many — but not all — Asian Americans that reminds me a little of the overprecise way old-time sci-fi fans used to speak, e.g., the Comic Book…
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