Isabela Vidal

10/2/25

ENGL 21001

Language is never neutral. It carries history, culture, identity, and even accusation. For people

with accents, language can sometimes become a barrier to belonging, as the very sounds of their

voices seem to measure their intelligence or their worth. Writer and filmmaker Safwat Saleem

takes this bias to task in his TED talk “Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my

accent.” He relates how his accent and stutter were targets of shame, and how he reclaimed his

voice in spite of the mockery. With personal storytelling, jokes, tonal shifts and sensitivity pleas,

Saleem is positioning the listener to reconsider their preconceived notions about how “normal”

speech should sound. In the end, his talk is not only a defense of his own voice; it’s also an

argument for valuing every voice — even if their speech diverges from what some consider ‘the

norm’. In the talk, Saleem makes his introduction with a recurring dream he has in which

someone approaches him and asks the straightforward question, “What’s your name?” and is

unable to answer. This dream speaks to his long-standing battle with a stutter that often made

him feel voiceless. His Pakistani accent would be another source of attack as he grew older.

Online commenters made fun of his voice in cruel, dismissive ways; they told him he was hard to

understand or that he should not read his own work. Saleem says the remarks fed his insecurities

and whether he should stop using his voice at all.

Saleem draws strength from the use of personal narrative as rhetoric. He opens his speech

with personal anecdotes from his life, which immediately establish ethos and draw on pathossince they induce empathy. Listening to Saleem remember his dream of having the inability to

respond to a simple question, we don’t have to share his stutter to appreciate the terror of being

voiceless. Zaxel speaks openly about his own issues as a child and experiences with cyber

bullying. And rather than posturing as a floating authority, Saleem speaks from wounded

vulnerability. That vulnerability only adds to his credibility, as it points out that his argument is

not from theory but reality. Allowing his viewers to look through his eyes, he makes his private

suffering a collective human concern.

Saleem is also adept at humor, and he has an ear for tonal shifts that lends him rhetorical

force. He tells funny stories, and early in the talk, he has some fun with voiceovers. These small

jokes relax his audience, so that they are more likely to accept whatever it is he is about to say.

But Saleem, who is a voice-over regular at National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, here

doesn’t go for humor over distress; in fact he moves into serious territory too when discussing

the viciousness of comments on posts or about how ridicule begets loneliness. It’s a way of

playing with humor and gravity in the same moment — as if he were acknowledging the

ambivalence of his own experience: Life when you speak with an accent or a stutter is funny as

well as painful. The rhetorical decision helps highlight how absurd it is to judge a person by their

voice, but does so in a manner one realises how serious these judgements can be. By shifting so

smoothly among registers, Saleem never lets the audience fully unplug and always keeps all

that’s serious in what he’s saying landing hard.

At the heart of Saleem’s talk is his attempt to redefine “normal” speaking. By pointing

out the negative remarks from others with his own assertion that his accent is a part of who he is,

he encourages us to question the belief that there’s only one way to speak English. Saleem will

not accept that judgment and says so when he remembers being told he doesn’t sound “normal.”Instead, he redefines “normal” as a spectrum that encompasses all voices, accents and speech

patterns. This rhetorical maneuver challenges the ideology behind “standard English,” which

many of our schools, workplaces and media long have advanced. In challenging the arbitrariness

of linguistic standards, Saleem undermines the very basis of accent-related bias. His mission is

not just to defend what he says, but also to broaden the audience’s understanding of language

variety. In this, he makes his experience as an individual a part of a wider battle for cultural

inclusion. Saleem makes one last pitch to the audience by saying “I will keep talking.” He does

more than tell the story of his own resilience; he implicitly invites others to join him in speaking

out. By repeating this phrase, it becomes a mantra that others can adopt — particularly those who

have been marginalized by the pattern or sing-song of their speech. The premise behind the

argument is fairly clear: if voices like his are silenced, stories and perspectives (and truths) only

they can know will not be heard. He empowers listeners to share in his misery and be encouraged

to battle forward. What he’s really saying at the end is that people should walk away not just

knowing more about language prejudice, but also realizing that sometimes the best thing to do is

step back, talk less, or maybe just listen — especially since voices like his are so often ignored.

His final point is that the audience should walk out of the theater not just more educated

about language prejudice but also questioning how they treat people who speak differently from

themselves.The last thing he wants is for the audience to leave the theater feeling smug that

they’re open-minded, but rather “questioning how we treat people who speak different from

ourselves.” The utility of Saleem’s rhetorical strategy doesn’t just cap out at his own narrative,

either. Language politics affect millions of people who speak with an accent, including

immigrants, students at international schools and members of multilingual homes. All too often,they are considered less smart or less authoritative because their voices sound different. The

speech is important because it confronts that prejudice, making audiences tackle it full on.

Personalizing what it means to be spat upon and resisting the boxy enclosure of “normal,”

Saleem pushes out the perimeter for what can be considered legitimate speech. His strategies

remind us accents are not errors to be corrected but signals of diverse cultural histories that

expand our collective human story. The way we hear all of this has implications that go far

beyond educators and employers, whether the listeners are among those groups or not: Paying

attention to how you react to someone’s accent can perpetuate alienation or build community. In

“Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent,” Safwat Saleem modes personal

narrative, humor, tonal shifts and appeals to empathy to respond to a form of linguistic

discrimination and reclaim the value of his voice. His anecdotes of stuttering, accent and online

abuse uncover the profound emotional toll of having it instilled in one that they do not sound

“normal.” But in how openly he speaks over this thing that once allowed him to be shouted

down, Saleem turns that very thing into power. His rhetorical tactics persuade the listeners to

consider the previously deemed settled convictions about accents and also inspire speakers to

continue, knowing that they cannot be silenced or made to change. In the end, Saleem’s voice is

not even just his own; it is also the voice of anyone who has ever been told to shut up aculously,

his talk is a testament that every voice matters, and the shouting back may be its form of

resistance.