If a person mocks another for their accent and when they don’t even speak another language themselves, that can only reveal a rather parochial person.
A parishioner is defined this way: a person with an ideology, attitude, or set of values that seems narrow, restricted, or limited by the influence of a small community, local traditions, or typical visions of relatively isolated groups.
In this context, it is necessary to excuse a person who makes fun of others for their accent, customs, or ideas, since that person does not have a broad or enriched cultural background with which they can be compared.
It is generally thought that a parishioner comes from a village, rural, or very natural environment. But in our contemporary western and urban world, you find many people with similar attitudes.
A clear example is that of US citizens, who almost always speak only one language: English. The reason why they almost always speak only one language is that in the contemporary world English is a popular and worldwide language. When an American citizen goes to other regions of the world, wherever they go, people speak to them in English or make an attempt, so they make minimal effort to learn other languages.
This seems very special and privileged – just think that if you are a Spanish-speaker and you go to the most remote place on Earth, for example, you walk down a street in Ulaanbaatar and people there try to speak to you in Spanish … that would make you feel good and comfortable.
But it’s actually quite a serious limit because many Americans end up with a parochial mentality. They see the rest of the world as something very comic, folkloric, and banal.
Those who do not speak English seem primitive and lacking in the modern sense, while they are the ones who actually turn out like this: patrons.
In Latin America, on a smaller scale, the same thing happens. The Spanish ancestors prohibited the use of languages other than Spanish in the colonies, this included the destruction of many of our ancestral languages, the exclusion of other languages of the Iberian Peninsula (Basque, Catalan, Andalusian, Galician, etc.) and, especially for this case, knowledge of other European languages.
To this day, Latin Americans find it difficult to learn other languages when compared to the rest of the world (for example, Africans learn languages faster than the average Latin American).
This is not the fault of Latin Americans, nor does it mean that they are less intelligent (in extension, today’s Spaniards have a similar situation).
The reason is historical and has to do with the exclusion of other languages in the social life of the former Spanish colonies. An example of this occurs in South America.
The most widely spoken language in this continent is Portuguese, due to the presence of giant Brazil.
However, Spanish-speaking South American countries have very little idea of Portuguese, while Brazilians understand more Spanish on average.
The solution will always be at the level of education.
Both in the US and in Latin America, children have to receive instruction that sensitizes them and gives them sufficient information about the planet on which they live.
The human being is not American, he is not Spanish, he is not French … we are a human universe with billions of possibilities of being.
So when someone makes fun of your accent, you shouldn’t be angry, but rather feel compassion. You can say “thank you for finding the accent of my land so funny… yes, in my country we are fun and we love hearing other people’s accents, like yours.”
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