Why do people with extremely heavy accents routinely repeat the same thing faster and faster when you can't understand their accent?

Frustration

It’s just the desire to be understood. Why do Americans talk louder and slower to someone that doesn’t speak english? :)

I don’t know. I have this problem with call center agents all the time. I have a bit of a thing about background noise – selective hearing or something – and when they’re in a room with a hundred other people all talking on the phone in the background I can’t understand a damn thing the agent is saying. It’s incredibly frustrating, especially since I’m normally really good at compensating for heavy accents.

As for why, I think it may be that their competency with the language has been implicitly called into question. Fluency in a second language is a point of pride. When one is speaking what one considers to be fluent English and it’s met with incomprehension, there’s an understandable impulse to reassert one’s fluency as a way of salvaging injured pride. To revert to a slower pace or use simpler phraseology would be, in a way, to concede a failing and to lower oneself relative to your interlocutor. It may be that the pragmatic considerations of conveying information become secondary to maintaining one’s dignity.

The same reason that Americans and Brits often speak to native speakers of other languages as if they are deaf children, perhaps…?

Cluelessness and frustration.

@thorninmud‘s got a good point. If someone called me out on my French ability or something, I would tend not to want to slow down and enunciate more clearly… Matter of wounded ego.

I grew up hearing an Indian English dialect at home, so I feel pretty confident talking with Indians in English. It’s a different way of parsing phrases, placing emphasis, dropping articles here and there, haha…

I’d say your best bet to increase the odds of communication would be to slow down your speech. Make it about you. Not, “What the hell did you say? That was gibberish,” but, “I am having trouble understanding you. Can you please speak more slowly, sir/madam?”

At least you get to hold this conversation on (roughly) your terms… That is to say, not in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, Telegu, or Kannada, for instance…

Call centre & service provider operatives with heavy accents usually “modify” their tone as a matter of course. I’ve never had an issue understanding accents from the sub-continent, it’s the broad glaswegian, or even worse, thick belfast drone that has me lost.
Having said that, a reckon a lorra buggers would av nee clue wot the heel ar woz gannin on aboot, if I spoke in my local tongue…tha nars worra mean like?

@ucme I’m picking up what you’re putting down.

@bonnylass Community service pet?

“I reckon a lot of buggers (folks, people) woudn’t have a clue what the hell I was going on about, if I spoke in my local tongue, you know what I mean?”

Aye, tha did canny, hinny…nowt hellish tho but.

Ok, you lost me at “hellish tho but”

@ucme Broad Yorkshire, Geordie or Scottish?

Durham, right?

@janbb Yeah, @Seek_Kolinahr got me, although I think she knew this already from a previous chat we had about Durham Cathedral.
Hellish up here means quite the opposite, fantastic/brilliant.

Well, I was in the right part of the country anyroad. Tha’s a canny laddie theeself.

The don’t have accents. They are speaking completely normally for their background. Telling someone “they have an accent” is actually rather demeaning to them.

YOU have a comprehension problem. They are communicating in the only way they know how.

@janbb Aye, just a kick in the arse doon tha road pet :-)

@ucme But Durham would be considered Geordie, wouldn’t it?

@janbb Good god no, geordies are from Newcastle/Gateshead, mackems are from Sunderland, us being between the two are largely without labels..just cool friendly folks.

Good booze coming out of Newcastle, though. Love me some broon ale. And Werewolf is one of my favourites. They need to start cranking that stuff out year ‘round.

I like me some newcky brown too. Nowt wrong with the place, but there is a long standing traditional rivalry going on up here, tribalistic buggers.

Love how everyone has their own name for the stuff. Broon Ale, Newcy B, Newcky brown…

If it is a call center and this is happening a lot in a conversation I asked to be transfered to someone in North America (I am American). At first I will tell them I don’t understand. If it is just one word I ask them to spell it (I do the same with friends, in fact many will just go ahead and spell it without me asking, my Russian friend does that).

Go’ed laa I’ve gotta meat n potato pazzy for me dinner this avvy so I’ll probably scan that an go akip for a bit.

^^Scouse git ;-}

@ucme Naw – I was married to the Scouse git and it wasn’t Crumpet.

@janbb You were? Did he have the obligatory perm & tache combo then, coz dey do tho don’t dey tho?

@ucme I doan’t ‘member but I’ll looook in a boook and tell ya.

If it helps, to speak spanish all you have to do is add “o” to the end of each word.
Howo mucho foro el beero?

Ha ha ha ha ha…

Now now, it’s totally worth it to know how to ask for a brew in Spanish. That is need-to-know information.

Hola guapo, otra cerveza, por favor!

@ETpro I’m guessing that you might be referring to some of the telemarketing or tech help folks who have been outsourced to other countries. Do what my mom does. She says to the person, I’m sorry, I cannot understand you. You need to put a native American speaker (not a Native American, nor British English) on the line or I’m going to have to hang up.

Una Mas cerveza, por favor Senorita.

How true @Seek_Kolinahr. I have a friend who claims to be able to ask for beer in, I believe, 38 different languages. Of course, it helps that a large number of them are “Pivo” or “Piwo”, two words that sound much alike in the respective languages, particularly after a few.

Uh huh. I know there’s a website specifically dedicated to telling one how to order a beer in fifty languages.

“Otra cerveza” is correct for “another beer”, right? Believe me, I’m not hitting on a bartender until I’ve had at least one. ^_^

@rojo Yeah, well there’s frustration on both sides.

@Adirondackwannabe Perhaps because it has some possibility of helping. Speaking more slowly won’t help if the other party has no comprehension of your language, but it certainly will if the listener understands it a bit. There is such a thing as too fast to be understood no matter how “normal” your accent.

@Seek_Kolinahr Yes its’ often call centers and same here to background noise. But I have a programmer in Hyderabad that I work with from time to time. He’s really good at what he does. But he’d always rather talk through a new assignment on Skype rather than Google chat. I can read what he writes in email or chat just fine. But understanding him on Skype is a challenge. He seems to pick up my accent with no trouble. Perhaps it’s our age difference.

@thorninmud Great point. If I can find a way to ask for clarity making the problem mine and not theirs, that may help.

@bookish1 I’ll test the idea of slowing down my own speech. Might help.

@ucme If the call-center operators I’ve been dealing with are modifying their accents, perhaps they should abandon that strategy. So you’re from up North, eh? I lived in Edinburgh for a time, so I got used to something not to dissimilar. But now, 50 years later, go fast with that and I’m lost.

@elbanditoroso Nice egalitarian answer, but it simply doesn’t fly. I could claim to speak German, and come out with a string of gibberish that is remotely like words in those languages, but pour them out as fast as my mouth can move. Nobody from Germany would understand a word I was saying, and that would not be their fault.

@JLeslie Excellent idea. Next time it comes up on a call center, I’ll do just that.

@Kardamom Yes, mostly telemarketing (easy—hang up) and tech call centers. Also the guy I’m collaborating with on some client’s work right now. He’s in Hyderabad, India.

Just remember Z is zed, if they are spelling something out. Most Call Centers learn British English. Once in a blue moon it is in Latin America and they tend to use American spelling. And, if you are switched to Canada they might still use zed, but it isn’t likely they would have to spell for you.

@ETpro Aye, north-east to be precise & yeah, those scots are hard to ken.