Talking Back as an Accented Speaker?

In this essay, I offer an analysis of the biblical story of the shibboleth incident and Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” (1996), both of which illustrate how accented speech is manipulated and construed as an act that prefigures violence and mistreatment. I interpret such violence as showcasing Judith Butler’s observation that language is able to act and even act against the speaker. However, whereas Butler understands the wounding power of language as a result of us being constituted in language, which may inflict on any linguistic being, I argue that we are not invariably vulnerable in different languages. I conclude by observing that accented speech, as a case of linguistic survivability, not only challenges Butler’s generalized account of linguistic vulnerability, but also raises the question of how to respond to the kind of violence that exploits precisely the incongruity between body and speech.