Thanks to this kind of bias, accents can be a shortcut that allows us to "linguistically profile" others based on the stereotypes of their regional backgrounds, class, gender or ethnicity. Without even realising, we can use this to discriminate. This can make it hard for marginalised and minority speakers to find a job, gain an education, or even in find a home. It takes just a moment for us to pass judgement on a person based on how they sound Credit: Alamy. In one study, John Baugh, a sociolinguist at Stanford University, made repeated phone calls in answer to newspaper advertisements for apartments, using different accents , and recorded how many of those apartments were available or unavailable, depending on whether he used African American English , Chicano English or Standard American English accents.
When Baugh used a non-standard accent, suddenly fewer apartments were available to him. Since the s, research has reinforced how listeners can attribute all kinds of unrelated personal traits to a speaker — from height, physical attractiveness, social status, intelligence, education, good character, sociability, even criminality — just based on how they sound.
In the real world, these biases can have far-reaching repercussions for those who speak with a socially stigmatised accent. A group of Filipino trainees undergoing a speech exercise at an English language course in Manila in Credit: Getty Images. Those with non-standard accents are often rated as better employed in lower status, less desirable jobs.
These findings can have a major impact on our working lives and careers , especially if you speak with a non-standard accent. The more people change their accents to fit in with prevailing attitudes and stereotypes, the more those views are reinforced. This has had some real life impacts. See Today's Synonym. The guttersnipe is on her way to becoming a fair lady. The same message is either good or bad, pretty or ugly, depending on how the message is packaged and whose ears are receiving it.
My Fair Lady demonstrates this with different regional varieties of native English, but the same principles apply when looking at English spoken by a nonnative speaker, with a French, German, or Chinese accent, for example. If you speak, you have an accent. A ton of social information is wrapped up in the way a person pronounces her words—and the way the listener perceives them. Being able to hear differences in accents might be biological.
Babies as young as five months can tell the difference! Scientists discovered that infants pay more attention to people speaking in their native accents than those speaking in a foreign accent. Kids are more likely to accept toys from native speakers and to befriend other children who speak in the same way they do. The other kind of accent is simply the way a group of people speak their native language.
This is determined by where they live and what social groups they belong to. People who live in close contact grow to share a way of speaking, or accent, which will differ from the way other groups in other places speak.
You may notice that someone has a Texas accent - for example, particularly if you're not from Texas yourself. You notice it because it's different from the way you speak. In reality, everybody has an accent - in somebody else's opinion! People have trouble with sounds that don't exist in the language or languages that they first learned as a young child. We are born capable of both producing and perceiving all of the sounds of all human languages.
In infancy, a child begins to learn what sounds are important in his or her language, and to disregard the rest. By the time you're a year old, you've learned to ignore most distinctions among sounds that don't matter in your own language. The older you get, the harder it becomes to learn the sounds that are part of a different language. German speakers learning English, for example, are likely to have trouble with the sounds found at the beginning of the words wish and this, because those sounds don't exist in German.
So they may pronounce them instead as v and z - similar sounds that do occur in German. It's well known that native speakers of Japanese often have trouble with the English l and r sounds. This is because the Japanese language doesn't distinguish between these two sounds. For this reason, Japanese speakers learning English find it hard to produce the right one at the right time, and they also have a hard time hearing the difference between English words like light and right.
An English speaker would have similar problems trying to speak and understand Thai, which distinguishes between 'aspirated' and 'unaspirated' p. To see the difference, hold your hand in front of your mouth and say the words pot and spot. If you say the words naturally, you should feel a small puff of air against your hand when you say the p in pot but not when you say the p in spot.
In English, p is always aspirated that is, it has that puff of air at the beginning of a word like pot , but not when it occurs after s. Adam - Thank you Jonathan for lending your voice to that. Donald - How does ethanol interact with the brain and why does it disproportionately affect the area involved in behaviour and movement rather than the parts of the brain involved in vision, hearing, touch or the brainstem involved in breathing, blood pressure and heart rate?
Skip to main content. Earth Science. QotW - Why are some people so good at accents? What's behind some people's ability to do accents? Part of the show Periodic Table: Au Years. Play Download. Question Why are some people good at doing accents, and others aren't? Answer Adam Murphy set out to find an answer to Lia's question Previous How does alcohol affect my brain?
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