Unconventionally: The Language of Heather Hansen
Unjustified as it may seem, the fact is, there is power in speaking the English language. Many of us see it as a sign of education, prestige, and privilege. In places where it is not the native tongue, it’s often used as an affirmation of superiority. People who speak flawless English are generally treated with a different level of respect or awe. It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s how you say it. In English.
This impression is something that Heather Hansen wants to change.
Heather is a global communication consultant,
founder of the Global Speech Academy, author, and TEDx speaker.
She was born and raised in California, immersed herself in the German language as a teenager, and followed her boyfriend to Denmark, where she learned Danish.
“I went there to do a Master's in Linguistics, but was really only there to be with my boyfriend,” she laughs.
The boyfriend became her husband and they relocated to Singapore for his job in 2006. Eight years later, she and her family moved back to Denmark before returning to Singapore in 2018.
It might have been the early exposure to diverse places and even more diverse languages, or it could just be an innate curiosity for cultural nuances that propelled Heather towards her current career. Perhaps, however, she was always meant to shatter boundaries. In college, she even designed her own major to focus on language and society. For her master’s thesis, she intended to study the use of English on the Internet, except that one shortsighted professor rejected it as “garbage.”
Listening to Heather discuss the effects of language is fascinating in itself, maybe because it’s something most of us don’t even think about. How we treat language, however, speaks volumes of our tastes, inclinations, and perspectives.
Muted Language
The standard definition of ‘muted’ is the inability to speak, or the absence of speech. As humans, we have the ability to whisper, shout, yodel, and talk. But Heather has picked up on something so obvious, yet profound, that the transition to digital has further underlined.
“You’re on mute!” has been the catchphrase of video calls and Zoom meetings, after all. According to Heather, this seemingly trivial phrase reveals a much deeper insight into how people communicate.
“What we need right now is to hear people’s voices and the virtual age has silenced so many people. It makes it easier for those who don’t have the confidence to just turn off the camera and mute their mic and hide in the background. It’s going to take a lot of work for us as individuals and as organizations to make sure our people are unmuted and that we are contributing and making an impact in the world.”
Moreover, COVID-19, she believes, has also muted people in their careers, families, friendships, and relationships.
But being muted isn’t always about the speaker. Heather recalls a time when a PhD researcher from Iran went to Denmark to attend a conference. “He tells me, there will be someone speaking who doesn’t have English as a native language. Maybe they’re from India, maybe they’re from the Middle East, maybe they’re from Asia. It could be some of the most brilliant research ever, and there will be people leaving the room, native [English] speakers in the hallways saying that they couldn’t understand a word they said.”
This nonchalance around language expectations is a form of being muted, she explains.
“These people's voices are not being heard. Their research isn't being heard because they speak in a way that doesn't meet the expectation of the listener.”
Heather’s next book, the aptly titled Unmuted, influenced by the pandemic, discusses this issue further. What was initially planned to be a sequel to her earlier work Powerful People Skills, she decided that people need a reminder to find their voices and listen to others.
In her book, she answers the question “How can we be more conscious, confident, and connected communicators?”.
Undertones of Discrimination
It is well-known that Margaret Thatcher had elocution lessons to lower her voice — advice that supposedly helped her win the election in 1979. According to studies, voters preferred lower-pitched voices, relating them to leadership, honesty, and dominance. Back then, the trailblazing Prime Minister was in an arena surrounded by men.
How someone speaks often influences our assumptions about a person. When we hear a certain accent, we unconsciously or consciously make judgments about their background, and even about their education or social status. But there lies the problem.
“The biggest challenge in the area in which I work is that accentism is probably the last invisible, unspoken discrimination that we’re facing. And people don’t realise it exists.”
In fact, there's an entire industry dedicated to reducing accents.
“People are there to try to change your voice, bringing your octave down so you can sound more authoritative and powerful because our unconscious bias is that a male voice has power and authority.”
She remembers one of her friends, a consultant, telling her about talking several times to the Vice President of a company on the phone. When they finally met in person, the Vice President's initial reaction was: “Oh I didn’t realize you were Black. You didn’t sound Black on the phone.”
“There is an expectation that someone who is Black sounds a certain way and these are deeply ingrained biases,” she adds. In her line of work, Heather has had to deal with clients asking her to mend their speech so they could land a promotion, as well as human resources coming to her to “fix” a person, saying “Oh, we have an acting CFO, we want to make him CFO, but he’s really difficult to understand.”
“Certain accents will always be seen as higher prestige, more educated, more trustworthy. There’s a reason why over 85% of the companies on Fortune 500 feature CEOs that are native English speakers.”
Heather believes that this partiality ties into racial issues, white privilege “A lot of this just goes all the way back to the privilege of being born into English, and the unconscious biases that the loudest person in the room is the one who’s heard, the most eloquent speaker must be a leader,” she says. “We know that’s not true. We just want to hear accents that meet our expectations.”
Connection, Not Perfection
While grammar, spelling, syntax — a system created to help people understand each other, is all based on correctness, Heather's TedX talk is focused on how to speak “bad English”.
And she isn’t telling people to picket their English teachers.
“Of course we need to work on our language skills so that we are intelligible. But that does not mean we have to erase our accents. We can have an accent and still be intelligible. It’s not just my American accent that people are able to understand in the world.”
Heather emphasizes that communication is a two-way street, and comprehension is just as much about the speaker as it is about the listener. She observes that people spend so much time and effort trying to make their speech perfect when they should be focusing on something else: connection.
“Perfection is not necessary, it is slowing us down, you need to get those messages out there. As long as your receiver can understand the message, the receiver also needs to be forgiving. Creating that connection and relationship through language. It's a tool for us to connect and collaborate and communicate.”
“It’s about expanding the way you see the world,” she adds. “When you understand people who are different from you, in essence, you are expanding your entire outlook and perception of the world.”
Heather is convinced that this is the root of peace and understanding — and her vision is of the possibility we could create if we just listened a little better.
Heather is a mother to two young girls who, like all of us, are navigating the world of language and communication. Growing up in Singapore, they hear all kinds of accents and language and they often come home from school with different inflections. How does she handle that? She lets it slide.
After all, she can understand them perfectly.
Follow Heather on LinkedIn:
Heather Hansen
Watch Heather's TEDx Talk
2 Billion Voices: How to speak bad English perfectly
Watch this space for news and updates on Heather’s upcoming book “Unmuted”.
Watch the full video interview with Heather
on my @iamginaromero Facebook page.
