Accent of Call Center Agents and influence on American Accen

its a phenomenon quite common now a days...
Most of the American companies are outsourcing and have already outsorced a great no. of call centers to countries where english is spoken as a second language...
My question is that their accents; are they easy to understand and secondly most of em try to imitate American Accent so are they successfull enough to beat a born american person or a person who is native......in terms of that they present their self as if they are Americans in a way that they try to speak american accent so was it possible for any native to get an idea that he is non native speaker......
Or a person who has never ever seen Big Apple in reallity can speak in a partcular newyorker accent................
Secondly wont it influence and modulate the speech style of people talikng to them........
Means i foresee a very major influence of either Indian Language or Irish accent ( because most of the outsorced call centers are in India & Ireland)
on american accent because ppl speakin to ppl from these countries will somehow or may unintenionally develop or gain their pronounciation as we did from early settlers and inhabitors of France, Ireland and UK....
What do you feel about it................

Call Center accents have become a pet peeve of Americans. The Indian accents I have come across in dealing with call centers are terrible. No one I know ( I'm from the USA), who has had tried to communicate with an Indian agent on the line, has any idea what they are talking about. We usually ask them to repeat themselves again and again until we finally give up with our questions unanswered. It's extremely frustrating. There may be some who speak decent English but I've yet to come across him or her. I realize that most of us in the US, including myself, are horrible with other languages and that doesn't help and I think that they are trying very hard.

But in our business here in the states, we have many Indian customers and are able to understand most of them quite well. Of course they live here and work here I'm sure that helps. I also see that some former Indian ciitzens pick up the language, and even it's nuances and slang, much better than others. Some people have an ability for languages while others, unfortuantely, do not. We also have many Spanish and French Canadian customers and it's the same with them. One French couple is a good case in point. She has almost no accent yet I can't understand a word her husband says. Of course they can't understand a word of my hideous French either. But the call centers so far - disasterous. I wonder who hires the agents.

You ask if the Indian and Irish agents should try to pick up a NYC accent. Heaven help us if they decide to try a Brooklyn accent on top of it all! No one even here in the states can understand Brooklyn accents with any great success, except Brooklynites . . . and I wonder about that.

I havent' come across any Irish call center agents but I've met Irish people and understand them fine but then my Irish grandmother lived with us when I was a child so that may explain my ability to understand that accent.

There could be some sort of influence, as you suggest, from all this outsourcing and that is that maybe we Americans are finally going to have to learn some other languages and fluently.

I think the problem is that if you deliberately call a business oversees, you will gladly struggle if that person is trying to speak in English. However, when you have phoned a domestic company you do not expect have problems communicating with that company's representative!

Yes, Rick that is the crux of the problem and a great annoyance. But Mark was asking if the agents' English was easy to understand and in my experience it has been impossible.

I agree. However, whenever I get accented, but completely transparent American English coming over the phone almost always they are Phillipino.

My experience have been different, everytime I'm assisted by a outsourced call center I don't have any trouble understanding what they are telling me. Of course, that's just my humild opinion.

As regards to what somebody said about Brooklyn and its accent. I don't know what you're talking about. People always talk about the so-called New York accent, Why? Because the read something about it on a mag or even worst, they always watch one of the many tv shows in which this accent is portrayed but, the truth is that nowadays the NY accent is not what it used to be in the past. And I'm not just saying this, I live this, because I do live here in NY and I do interact with NY'ers from all the five buroughs. NY accent have been intensively standarize in the last decades. Of course, every now and then I find somebody with an accent like that but, they sound funny and sometimes unintelligible to us, NY'ers with a standard accent too.

Don't believe???
Come to New York, talk to people and you will see that you are going to be able to understand everybody.

The accent of call-center employees has no influence at all on the pronunciation of English in the mainstream.

Indian call-centres are a large problem in all English-speaking countries.

I can't say that I've ever had much trouble understanding Indian accents on the phone, no matter how thick they are. English is English.

I don't have trouble understanding the call centre agents' accents - or any accent - but I've been bread in a sea of non-standard accents, including my own.

I have also received specialist training in the "General Indian Accent" from some of my linguistically-oriented South Asian classmates. Now, considering that I'm Chinese, and well-learned in Indian English, I'm already able to completely understand the accents of a third of the world's population. Wheee!!

Correction:

"I've been *bred* in a sea of non-standard accents."

To Menar:

I believe you. In any case, I don't even think the "traditional Brooklyn accent" would be hard to understand compared to, say, a Newcastle (Geordie) or Newfoundland accent.

I had a teacher in secondary school who was from Brooklyn. She warned us on the first day of school that "she might talk fast, and talk weird, and to tell her to slow down whenever we couldn't understand her." Well... I never had ANY trouble understanding her, and her talking speed was only one-half of my own! (Maybe she made a conscious effort, but anyway, I didn't even notice any difference at all between her accent and General American English.)

Ah Noo Yawk tawk is just hahrrible

To Nanny Fine:

Even if you were to say just that, I'd completely understand you.

Nanny Fine,
"Ah Noo Yawk tawk is just hahrrible"

-That shows me that you have no idea what you're talking about.-

The defense rests...

I've been around people with Indian accents for a while and I still have problems understanding them. They are too thick for my ear, and also their intonation is weird.
However , I believe that they can take a course in sounds on English language and try to improve their accents. Even the ones who live in the US are hard to understand. Some of them are easier to understand, perhaps because of the length of time being in the US. Sometimes I have to call a call center when I need to troubleshoot some PC hardware and I get upset many times because I have to ask them to repeat themselves and another reason is that their customer service is bad sometimes.They don't understand that they have to please the customers. I wonder where they get their training from , US or India.
I also have problems with Chinese people's accents .Most of them don't finish the words, plus , especially the ones who work at Chinese buffets, can't speak English very correctly. They make too many mistakes, besides thei accents.