Accent and register

How it works

A clear Philippine English accent is fine for most writing seats and many voice seats. Register failures - slang, over-apology, Taglish in a customer thread - are not. Score them separately. EF EPI does not hear your candidate. For a U.S. company hiring one Filipino teammate, write this into the brief, the employment contract, and the peso payroll file before the start date. Slack habits do not override the Labor Code, BIR, or NPC. If the local employer of record holds the paper, they run the statutory step; you still owe a clean operating definition so the seat does not fail in week three. Put a number on the example when you budget loaded cost, because a nameless allowance always returns as a December surprise or a missed SLA.

Example: voice sample: audible PH English, script clean. Pass. Written sample: ‘I’ll try my very best po to revert back.’ Fail the register even if grammar parses.

How it differs

Customer-facing English is the output bar. Taglish is the mix. English as a filter is the process.

Common errors

Rejecting a strong writer for sounding Filipino on a Zoom.

In practice

Treat Accent and register as a week-one operating object. Put the expected sentence in the brief: what they send, to whom, by when. Culture words do not replace a template. Write an owner - founder, local employer, or worker - and a date you will look at it again: first cutoff, first holiday, or first miss. If nobody can show a contract clause, a payslip line, a calendar block, or a checklist box, you do not have accent and register yet. You have a conversation. Convert the conversation before the person starts, while changing the deal still costs a paragraph rather than a resignation. Re-read the worked example above against the actual hire in front of you. If the numbers in that example cannot be swapped for this seat’s pesos, hours, and start date, the brief is still unfinished.