Is there such a thing as an Asian American accent? Nobody can quite nail it down — or agree whether it exists — but apparently you know it when you hear it.
The existence of an Asian American accent has been debated on social media, sparking conversations on TikTok and many a Reddit thread, including one devoted to celebrities who purportedly have it — Ali Wong, Randall Park and Lucy Liu.
Adam Aleksic, 23, a Serbian American linguistics content creator who is based in Barcelona, Spain, created the TikTok video that many users are riffing from to give examples of the accent. Aleksic cites studies that suggest Asian Americans speak with a higher pitch, or breathier articulation, but raises questions about which of the many Asian identities this accent could cover.
Everyone seems to agree that, if it exists, the Asian American accent is hard to define. It’s not that of first-generation immigrants; rather, it’s something in the speech of those who speak perfect English, but with a flavor that lets you know the speaker is of Asian descent.
“I super hear it! I have it myself despite having grown up in California since I was 2,” Howard Wang, a Northern Virginia-based political scientist who emigrated from Taiwan as an infant and grew up in a Taiwanese American enclave in Northern California, wrote in a direct message on X. He speaks with a standard American accent. Now in his early 30s, he described it as “subtle, like a midwestern accent.”
“People with the accent tend to be a little more nasal and to have shorter, more direct tones when speaking English as opposed to people without the accent, who seem to lilt in tone more,” Wang added, referring to the YouTuber Future Canoe as an extreme example.
Historian Carlos Yu described it in a tweet on X as “a shared timbre and manner of enunciation among many — but not all — Asian Americans that reminds me a little of the overprecise way old-time sci-fi fans used to speak, e.g., the Comic Book Guy on ‘The Simpsons.’”
Yu, 54 — who is Filipino American, grew up in northern Wisconsin and now lives in Brooklyn, New York — said in an interview via direct message on X that he doesn’t have it. Instead, he said he sounds “like James Earl Jones doing an impression of William H. Macy in ‘Fargo.’”
For those who hear it, it’s distinctive enough to hear it in non-Asians, like YouTube personality TextuallyCC. Others liken it to Canadian or northern or southern Californian speech.
Despite these testimonials, linguists aren’t convinced an Asian American accent exists.
“It’s a very complex question. I do think that it’s definitely true that some people speak English in a way where it’s possible to identify them as being some kind of Asian American. Whether we can call that an accent or not is a different question,” Andrew Cheng, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, told NBC News. “Everyone has an accent because everyone speaks in some way that identifies them as being from some place.”
But when you’re talking about Asian Americans, that’s a broad swath of geography, ethnicities and languages.
“People have not been able to really define the boundaries of what this is,” said Cheng, whose research focuses on Korean Americans. “There’s questions of whether it is stronger in some regions of the country, such as California, where there’s a high Asian American population, or if it’s specific ethnicities — there’s East Asians and South Asians and Southeast Asians. Is it specifically the Koreans and Chinese, for example, but not the Hmong Americans or Japanese Americans?”
One phonetic distinction, particularly with Korean Americans, is the pronunciation of “O” — one syllable versus a drawn-out “Ohh,” Cheng said. But it’s not a strict definition.
“I study the phenomenon behind the sounds that people hear to identify as Asian American or what sociological and sociolinguistic inner workings affect people’s perceptions,” Cheng added, but when guessing if speakers are Asian American, “I don’t have the most accurate track record myself.”
Speech is not solely determined by people’s parents or families, experts say. As kids start day care or school, peers have more of an influence. People also study other languages or travel or live in different states or countries, influencing how they talk.
“That’s why even though my parents speak with a strong Taiwanese or Mandarin accent in their English, I don’t sound like my parents. When I speak English, I sound like the people that I grew up with. It just so happens that the people I grew up with in the Bay Area were largely Asian American,” Cheng said. “Kids who grew up in [Los Angeles’] Koreatown grew up with other Korean Americans. So the way that they speak is obviously influenced by Korean but not specifically the Korean of their parents, but the Korean American English that their peers were speaking. So there’s a slight nuance where they’re sounding like each other.”
Shekinah Deocares, who is Filipina and “a little Chinese” and grew up in Los Angeles, agrees.
“There are 100 Asian American accents. I have a very strong [San Fernando] Valley and American accent, so when I speak to people in my Filipino community, a lot of times they don’t think I’m Filipino,” Deocares said. “My voice doesn’t sound Filipino. The Asian American accent doesn’t even necessarily sound like your motherland Asian tongue at all. It’s a specific type of way that we talk.”
The 27-year-old community organizer said she welcomes this conversation.
“Being able to label that there is this accent, there is a power to it. Part of the power is that more people would be able to dissect it and study it and acknowledge it,” Deocares said. “I wouldn’t be offended if someone was like, ‘Oh, I could tell you’re Asian from talking to you,’ but also I’m extremely proud that I’m Asian. Not to say that no one would be offended. I’m sure there are people that would be and that’s a deeper conversation.”
Asela Kemper, 30, a writer in Ashland, Oregon, is one of them.
“It does not exist and is another way to downplay Asian Americans like me for being Americans. I’m half Korean and half Chinese,” she said in a direct message on X.
Jerry Won Lee, the director of the International Center for Writing and Translation and director of the Program in Global Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Irvine, contends that accents are more perceived than they are real.
Lee cited a landmark 1992 sociolinguistics study in which undergraduate students listened to a recorded lecture with a photo of a white woman or Chinese American woman projected on a screen. Students reported difficulties understanding the lecture when they assumed the professor was Asian American, even though the speaker was actually the same person.
“That proved empirically the possibility of accents being imagined, in the mind of the listener,” Lee said.
However, the mainstreaming of Asian and American culture in the States over the past decade has created less of a stigma about Asian speech patterns, Lee said.
“On a positive note, if there is such a thing as an Asian American accent, I don’t think it’s going [to be] as pathologized as it would have been when I was coming up, because of things like K-pop. If there is an Asian American accent, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing.”