Thinking that Cambodian-born Phanna Xieng didn't display sufficient language skills and that his accent was difficult to understand, Seattle-based People's National Bank turned him down for a post where he'd interact with irate customers rejected for loans. Xieng sued, and his lawyers called forth testimony of medical experts who claimed the shock of not getting promoted was so psychologically traumatic that it would prevent Xieng from working for at least five years. It brought back memories, they said, of mistreatment at the hands of the murderous Khmer Rouge. Xieng was awarded $389,000.

In the Yale Law Journal, Stanford's Mari Matsuda—a leader in the Critical Race Theory movement—argues that employers should be made to accommodate shortcomings in English, or "differences of speech," just as they must accommodate the "absence of speech" of deaf employees. Matsuda suggests that employers hire supervisors conversant with the language their assistants wish to speak, or else try using "sign language" or "pictographs." To the argument that customers would have a hard time understanding dozens of accents, Matsuda replies that it is "necessary to reject customer preference arguments." Barring accent discrimination in service jobs "will admittedly impose some hardship on businesses that rely heavily on pleasing customer whims." If customers fail to understand an accent, Matsuda suggests, it may have been their own fault for having "lived a monocultural life."

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