{"id":51633,"date":"2021-07-28T10:52:05","date_gmt":"2021-07-28T15:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51633"},"modified":"2021-07-31T16:47:54","modified_gmt":"2021-07-31T21:47:54","slug":"scammers-and-swindlers-with-accents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=51633","title":{"rendered":"Scammers and swindlers with accents"},"content":{"rendered":"

The focus of this post is the nature and modus operandi of the pi\u00e0nzi \u9a19\u5b50 (\"swindler; scammer\").<\/p>\r\n

According to this article in Chinese<\/a>, scammers do not speak good Mandarin because having an \"accent\" enables them to carry out target screening.\u00a0 Such an argument may seem like a bit of a stretch, but let's see how this supposedly works out through the eyes of two Mandarin speaking PRC citizens who have been the intended victims of the schemes of such pi\u00e0nzi \u9a19\u5b50, who pose as representing banks and other financial institutions, public security bureaus, and so forth.<\/p>\r\n

I<\/b><\/p>\r\n

The article suggests that there are three reasons why phone scammers speak in strong topolect accents rather than standard Mandarin:1. Accent serves as a \"mechanism of filtration\", because those who are not sensitive enough to non-Mandarin accents and who can't recognize what is or is not Mandarin are more prone to fraud. 2. The scammers are simply not capable of speaking standard Mandarin given the current situation of Mandarin popularization in China. The scammers are more likely to be unschooled, and they usually share the same accent. 3. It is because of the high illiteracy rate in China that many people can't tell frauds from reliable phone calls made by authentic institutions.<\/div>\r\n

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I think the article's explanation makes some sense to a certain extent because in most cases, the staff of banks, government bureaus, census offices, courts, and police, etc., whom scammers often impersonate are required to speak standard Mandarin when making phone calls. As a result, most people would assume that the caller must be a scammer if he\/she speaks in broad accents. And those who can't tell topolects from Mandarin and who lack the opportunity to get to know this common sense (that Mandarin is used in such calls when they are genuine) are thus more likely to be deceived. This point of view reflects, if not strengthens, the absolute domination of Mandarin and marginalization of topolects in China, and I think it unfairly associates the inability of speaking and recognizing Mandarin with ignorance and low intelligence. \u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\r\n
\u00a0<\/div>\r\n
Personally, I don't think the scammers deliberately use topolect accents instead of Mandarin when making phone frauds.\u00a0 It's just the way they talk in everyday life.<\/div>\r\n
\u00a0<\/div>\r\n
\u00a0<\/div>\r\n
II<\/b><\/div>\r\n
\u00a0<\/div>\r\n
The reasons given in the article make sense. Most members of a swindler group are from the same village. Such schemes are a popular form of business at the beginning of their growth, like other legal township business in China, especially in the southern provinces. Then the swindlers find it's an efficient way to lock in their victims. For most of the swindle calls I received, the speakers had an accent of the southern provinces. There was only one exception when I received a call of a woman with Beijing accent who sounded about forty or fifty asking me to pay a visit to the police station in the area of my former work unit. I almost believed her, but when I called back, it was an invalid number. Still I can't understand what profit the swindler can make by asking me to pay a visit to a police station? In the past 2-3 years, I haven't received any calls from swindlers. Instead, it is the calls from real estate agents that favor me from time to time now.<\/div>\r\n

Other respondents point out that some swindlers and scammers do speak decent Mandarin, but they are definitely few in number and not nearly so successful as those who speak heavily accented topolects.<\/p>\r\n

In my estimation, the article makes a lot of dubious, if not specious, assumptions about people who speak with accents.\u00a0 My guess is that a deeper motivation for the writing of this article is that its authors lament the low percentage of people in China who actually speak standard Mandarin.\u00a0 If you watch videos of newscasts or unrehearsed street speech on social media in China — e.g., recordings of people reacting to the floods in Henan — much of it is very hard to understand if you only know standard Mandarin.\u00a0 Henan accent is thus strongly marked — even though Henan is smack dab in the center of the Mandarin speaking areas of China — and, to one degree or another, constitutes a barrier to free and unimpeded communication with persons from other parts of the country.\u00a0 Because the authors of the article are disappointed by the low level of language unification throughout China, they attempt to stigmatize non-MSM (Modern Standard Mandarin) speech as associated with disreputable and even criminal types.\u00a0 The converse of all this besmirching of accented speech is that people who speak MSM are more intelligent and law-abiding.<\/p>\r\n

In my estimation, the situation surrounding topolectal speech usage in the PRC is far more complex than that presented in the cited article and needs to be treated more sensitively from sociolinguistic and historical angles if we are to arrive at a true appreciation of what it signifies.\u00a0 And this is not even to mention the matter of completely different Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages in the PRC!<\/p>\r\n

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Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\r\n