A Critical Inquiry into Fake Accents

My voice is a tad boyish, though I do try to inject girliness and coquettishness into it at times. I don’t know how successful I am at that. What I do know is that I don’t have a voice that anyone has ever described as mellifluous. I know what those voices sound like, and they don’t sound like mine.

I’ve thought about hitting reset on my voice a couple of times, in an attempt to sound smoother. Maybe I’ll use fewer fillers (“like” popularized by uptalking American white girls is a staple of my speech), perhaps, or eliminate the addendum “and stuff” from my lexicon, when I’m rattling off lists of things in harried voice notes to friends. Why do I talk in this unrefined, adolescent way? More importantly, how come I’ve never done anything about it? In fact, I’ve stubbornly remained the same way over the years because I think that’s authentic.

English not being my first language certainly complicates how I perceive my own voice. I know my accent is “American,” but it’s tinged with something else—something “other.” That “other” quality is less of my Somali-ness, and more of what I call my house voice. My sisters and I all sound like each other, just talking at different volumes and tempos. I am the loudest and fastest talker, of course—the motormouth of the house.

It feels fake and pretentious to want to sound more pleasing to my own ears, but why do so many people—from Madonna to Dorit Kemsley of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to disgraced academic Jessica Krug— genuinely attempt to? That’s something I’ve been wondering lately, after stumbling upon an influencer named Janaya “The Future” Khan who inexplicably started speaking in a transatlantic, quasi-Boston Brahman accent sometime in the last two years. Khan is Canadian.

How they sounded in 2018:

How they sound now:

janayathefuture

There are seasons of struggle and seasons of success. For many of us, we are in a season of struggle. We are in a time of sorrow and a time of great uncertainty. As much as we are moved by politics, our persons are also being challenged. We carry entire worlds within us; worlds of hurt and worlds of hope, and all of them are worth living in. While it hurts to be here, we cannot rush these moments seeking answers. Our questions are powerful. To question is to be alive. For what is success without struggle? What is the fruit that grows but never knows the sun? Never reaches for it? In this time of great political upheaval, we will stand the test of time, we will be the light and the dark. The hope and the hurt. What our political leaders lack in courage, we will carry through with our conviction.

October 4, 2020

Fake accent aside, their tone of voice is mesmerizing. I find myself in a trance-like state when I’m listening to them on Instagram, totally taken in. It ticks off all of the ASMR things for me, which is soothing, but I’m not really listening to them because they’re not really saying anything. All of their Instagram sermons are word salad.

But Khan isn’t the first well-known person that I’ve noticed who puts on a fake accent. That distinction belongs to the actor Brady Corbet. Corbet, who hails from Scottsdale, Arizona, sounded like this when I first encountered his work:

As a teenager obsessed with the cast of Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, specifically Jeff Licon and Joseph Gordon Levitt, I remember thinking JGL was a big jerk for appearing so aloof and cold toward his castmate in this clip. As an adult, however, I can understand that anyone in the presence of a dude from Scottsdale, Arizona cosplaying as a Brit would probably be screaming internally. I don’t think I could muster any sort of receptiveness, either, especially if I’m cringing because I know what this nigga actually sounds like! The problem is, back then I didn’t know what Corbet was supposed to sound like. I assumed that was his real accent.

Corbet has since recalibrated his speech to sound more like himself. While the British cadence is still very much present, he finally sounds more American. More Arizonian. It only took him, like, ten years.

Lindsay Lohan’s another example of an accent faker. A prominent example, at that, as she’s gone viral at least once for her fake accent. Her accent—a vaguely Arab one that she says is influenced by having friends from the Gulf, as well as visiting Syrian refugee camps in Europe—is a bizarre one. The first time I encountered it was a couple of years ago when she was spotted by the paparazzi smoking a cigarette outside of a restaurant on the Lower East Side of New York. A TMZ photographer asked her how her community service was going, and she shrieked, “Khalas, stob,” which is “enough” in the Arabic language, as well as the word “stop” spoken in an Arab accent as if LiLo’s native language is Arabic.

One of the times LiLo made waves for her newly acquired Arabic accent was in 2016 for a viral clip of her harassing a Syrian family. In the video, which she posted to her own Instagram, LiLo can be seen trying to kidnap the refugee children from their parents—after accusing the parents of human trafficking! At one point, she yells, “Don’t fuck with Pakistan.” The mom eventually punches LiLo in the face. Poof! This snaps LiLo back to reality. Miraculously, she loses her accent after that!

(Image by Jazzmyn Coker)

As violent and racist and wild as the clip of LiLo is, it’s still not the most egregious example of a fake accent that I’ve ever heard. That would be Camille Rowe’s fake accent. Here’s Rowe haphazardly toggling between her terrible French accent and her true American voice for her Vogue Beauty Secrets video.

This woman’s accent is as fake as a $3 bill, and yet, she persists.

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