During the Christmas holidays, there wasn’t ever a day where I would see status updates of my social media friends making a fuss about how they went to a party and there were girls with a British accent or how they liked hearing the American accent being spoken by returnees they met at a certain event.
Maybe they were just trying to be funny but I believe that the Ghanaian society has an unhealthy obsession with accents. Be it British, American, French or even Russian, once you sound different from the typical educated Ghanaian, you are given a holy pass on many things.
Oh it doesn’t matter that you cannot act to save your life, with a British accent you are treated like you just won an Oscar. Or that you have poor presentation skills, you would be chosen ahead of your Ghanaian counterpart for that radio job simply because they love how you pronounce ‘water’.
It is no surprise that we find many people who have never been to the KIA speaking with different variations of the American accent in a bid to sound superior to their colleagues. There was one funny moment some time ago when one popular female radio presenter in Ghana, who is known for speaking with an American accent was interviewing an American R& B artist and the American artist could not understand a word of what she was spewing.
