Accents and their effects

Peter   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 10:35 GMT
Hi there, I was wondering what peoples views were on whether or not a person accent has any bearing on what they can achieve in life. Do our accents have any influence on the progress we make, with our personal lives, our professional lives, how we suceed generally.

For examle in a job interview do you think there will be a bias against some one with a strong accent as opposed to some one without a strong accent. Would the interviewer be put off by a person with a strong Birmingham accent? Or a Liverpool accent? Especially in a very important job, like a lawyer or Doctor.

If as a customer or patient and you heard a strong Brummie accent, what do you immediately think? Stupid comes to ming generally, so therefore would an employer hire someone who people instantly think of as stupid as soon as they speak, even if they are not.

How about if you were sitting on a plane and the captain speaks to you, he has a strong Liverpool accent, what do you think? Untrustworthy, thus do you feel uncormfortable throughout the whole journey putting your life in a person hands who you stereotype in a negative manner.

Who would you date? A hugh Grant sound alike or a Lenny Henry/Frank Skinner sounalike?

Any views?
Damian   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 10:52 GMT
I think this is definitely much more of an "English" situation. In Scotland there is much less emphasis on accent and status I think...it is much less clearly defined. A doctor or bank manager or lawyer, here in Edinburgh anyway, is much more likely to have an accent broadly similar to those of less professionally qualified people. Even so, there is a certain standard that is inevitable, brought about by education and background, so a highly educated native born Glaswegian professional is bound to have an accent more in keeping with his status, and different from the accent of someone with very basic education and if not unemployed, then working in a much lower status job. I reckon that would apply anywhere, including the US.

It's not all about accent as such...more about how that accent is used in relation to the vocabulary and grammar used.

Personally I would no way date either Hugh Grant, Lenny Henry or Frank Skinner, however they sound! They all have more money than I do and I believe in paying my way.... :-)
JJM   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 13:21 GMT
I do think a case could be made for the concept that, in any language, the more an accent/dialect deviates from the arbitrary ruling "standard" dialect, the more likely the speaker will suffer a degree of discrimination.

Interestingly, in the UK these days, having an upper class accent has become more a liability than an asset: a complete reversal of former days. If you want to know the "in" accent, listen to Tony Blair some time.
Mxsmanic   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 22:09 GMT
Accent still seems to be important in the UK, but the UK is a very class-conscious society (it practically still has a caste system). In the USA, accent is generally unimportant. Of course, regional variations in accent in the USA are generally much smaller than those in the UK, too, so everyone tends to sound the same, anyway.

I've noticed that even English courses from the UK will use different accents in speaking exercises based on the type of person speaking, as if they wish to mark a given speaker as being of a certain class. In the USA, this device is rarely used, since so many people talk the same way, and class is much less important.
Kirk   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 22:22 GMT
I agree it's hard to draw a similar comparison between UK accents' relationship with class and US accents' relationship with class. Also, it is generally true that regional variations in UK dialects can be far greater (especially considering that the UK is much smaller than the US). However, I definitely wouldn't go so far as saying that in America "everyone tends to sound the same." Even if the situation is quite different from in the UK, the proliferation of "acent-reduction" courses for stigmatized American accents is a testament to the fact that in the USA how you speak still does matter. I find it strange that Mxsmanic, who recently derided Ebonics/AAVE as "illiterate" and "substandard," and implied that people who speak it sound "retarded" can go ahead and claim here that "everyone sounds the same" in America and imply that no one really pays attention to accent.

I'm not trying to emphasize the differences amongst American dialects, because it's true that the range of differences is generally smaller than those found in the UK. However, it's untrue to go nearly as far as saying "in the USA, accent is generally unimportant" when it clearly still is.
Brennus   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 22:23 GMT
Some accents are more prestigious than others, no doubt about it, and it also goes without saying that the American people are very suspicious of a person who speaks with a foreign, especially non-English, accent. Yet, if someone has either brains or something to sell, and the right personal connections, it doesn't seem to inhibit their ability to get a good job even in the United States.
Kirk   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 22:55 GMT
Right, Brennus, that can be true in a lot of cases. I just wanted to point out that Americans aren't immune to the concepts of equating accent with character ...this is obvious in the unfortunately common belief of certain accents, especially southern US or AAV English, to be "lazy" "illiterate" "backwards" or (insert other negative adjective here), or nonrhotic urban East-Coast varieties to be "low class" "tough" or "from the street." I remember watching a video in a sociolinguistics class that was documenting the struggles of a middle-class businesswoman native to Brooklyn to learn to speak a variety of American English with rhoticity and other nationally prestigious characteristics that she hoped wouldn't make her stand out when she spoke, as she felt her accent had held her back in the professional world.

Of course, even stigmatized accents often have prestige within the "in-group" that speaks them, which can be of great advantage over speaking a nationally prestigious variety. I've read about certain Texas lawyers who use their native Texan accent or even exaggerate it some when working with a "home-court" jury--which is more likely to consciously or subconsciously identify with the obviously Texan accent than with someone who may be viewed as from somewhere else.

My point is that, sociologically speaking, accent still matters in the US, whether or not the situation here can or can't be equally compared to the situation in the UK.
Frances   Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 23:41 GMT
Well here in Australia, there is in effect no accent differences between the classes or really in Australia (with a few minor exceptions). There are three types of accents though: broad, general and cultivated. The "cultivated" I think is somewhat looked down upon here; the "general" is preferred and "broad" can be looked down upon at times, or if not, the person is viewed as a loveable larrikin. The main distinction between accents here is rural and city dwellers. Country generally have a broader accent.
Crocodile Hunter   Thursday, April 28, 2005, 00:46 GMT
Isn't this three accents thing, broad, general and cultivated, more of a manufactured thing then something that is really there? To me it seems like some Australians are desperate to say that there is some accent variety in Oz, whether it be because most other English countries have regional accents, or just because the mother country(England) has scores. Is it that Australians are still not comfortable enough with there own identity and they have to try to emulate the traits of other English speaking countries with more clout than they themselves have?
Frances   Thursday, April 28, 2005, 00:49 GMT
Could be, could be not. The divisions are so artificial when it comes to such things
mjd   Thursday, April 28, 2005, 01:32 GMT
To me it sounds like there is definitely some accent variation in Australia. For example, Steve Irwin has a very strong Australian accent, but I've heard others whose accent is a bit closer to a British one.

Am I right in saying this or have I just been hearing wrong?
Frances   Thursday, April 28, 2005, 02:23 GMT
mjd - yes, Steve Irwin - broad; British - cultivated. I am not sure if this classifies as an accent or not but I would think so. I think the statistics are 20-25% broad, 60-70% general and 5-10% cultivated. Don't quote me on it though. I'm pretty much the general.
Kirk   Thursday, April 28, 2005, 06:32 GMT
I would imagine that as time goes on, specific regional variations will eventually pop up in AuE, if there already aren't any (such as the pronunciation of words like "school" and "chance" in different areas). Even with the high degree of mobility in the US, certain regional accents and even large-scale vowel chain shifts have been constantly developing. For example, in older comprehensive studies on American dialects (even up to 15 or 20 years ago), Western US and California English, if mentioned at all, used to be described briefly as being indistinguishable from most Midwestern or "General American" varieties. Dialect maps of the US would often and sometimes still do show many different pockets of areas in the Eastern US while everything west of the Mississippi excluding Texas was lumped into one homogenous dialect zone. Part of this was due to the fact that the relative newness of the west meant that there were very few people living there whose families had been living there for even two generations. Everyone was from somewhere else, so clear regional variants were harder to gauge (this is still somewhat the case). However, in recent years linguistic scholarship has found clear divergences from GenAm norms in Western US and specifically California English as well as in other areas--this despite Americans being one of the most mobile populations in the world.

While Australia isn't as big as the US, I wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades time a few more distinct regional variations started popping up, maybe even with regional variations on the general theme of "broad" "general" and "cultivated," if those trends haven't already minutely begun. Should be interesting to observe how American and Australian dialects develop as the years go by.
Damian   Thursday, April 28, 2005, 06:49 GMT
**also goes without saying that the American people are very suspicious of a person who speaks with a foreign, especially non-English, accent**

Really? Is that really true? I thought America was the melting pot of the world...democracy all round! That statement is tantamount to saying that Americans are intolerant...governed by ignorant blind prejudice. That may well be true in SOME areas, such as the US Middle West, judging from a truly scary article I read in a certain wide circulation UK magazine yesterday. I guess I would not survive in Redneckland and that's for sure! Metropolitan areas like New York City must have a more liberal and mature "European" outlook I reckon.
Travis   Thursday, April 28, 2005, 06:54 GMT
I wouldn't say that Americans're very suspicious of people who speak with a non-natively-English-speaking accent per se, at least here in Wisconsin; at least I haven't noticed much of such myself on the part of others around me here. If anything, prejudice with respect to accent here has been directed against other Americans, in particular anyone who speaks with a Midland or Southern accent, especially a Texan one. Of course, though, this is a place where many probably think that Sherman didn't do quite enough in his March to the Sea, but that's another story.