How Accents Shape Our Lives and Fuel Discrimination

Linguist Valerie Fridland argues in her new book, “Why We Talk Funny: the Real Story Behind Our Accents,” that humans instinctively use accents to categorize others, a behavior rooted in early childhood.

“We learn to recognize other people as being like us through the way that they sound,” Fridland said. Research shows that even young children favor friends with the same accent.

In one study, for example, five- and six-year-olds in Toronto viewed pairs of children on a computer screen – one with a local Canadian accent and one with a British accent. When asked whom they preferred as a friend, they chose the local accent despite daily exposure to diverse speech.

These accent-based judgments fuel stereotypes about class, ethnicity and region, leading to serious consequences. In job interviews, a posh accent may signal competence over a working-class one. A study found that listeners assume politicians with Southern American accents hold conservative views. Even jury reactions to witnesses can be affected, as Fridland believes occurred during the George Zimmerman trial.

Fridland, a linguistics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, is herself a case study in accent development. Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, with parents who spoke with French accents, she said, “Being surrounded by people who were very aware of outsider opinions of their accents primed me from a young age to be curious about why they were such markers of identity.”

Accent discrimination dates back to ancient times, Fridland writes, with a biblical example: the Gileadites identified enemy Ephraimites by asking them to say “shibboleth,” with deadly consequences for mispronunciation.

“Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.”

Fridland said people often react instinctively to accents “because we don’t understand their value.” Developing that understanding, and simply being aware of potential bias, can help fight prejudice.

Accent awareness begins almost at birth. “By about a year old, babies have already figured out the sounds that are prevalent in the languages around them,” Fridland said.

Research shows that one-year-olds respond to sounds present in their native languages and ignore absent ones.

Over the next few years, children pick up language from parents and peers. But accents truly emerge around age five, when children lose interest in parents’ speech and prefer peers, Fridland said: “‘Let’s go talk to these cool peers at school, because they’re way, way more fun.’ And that is when the accent starts to really ramp up.”

That dynamic explains why Fridland, despite having French-accented parents, ended up sounding like her American peers. The reverse stood out: during a show-and-tell at school, she described her teddy bear as “yuge” rather than “huge.”

“I spent the rest of that year so aggressively pronouncing my ‘H’ wherever I thought it should go that I became known as the girl with the spitting habit,” she wrote.

Accent differences are rooted in history. American English is mostly rhotic – pronouncing “R” before consonants and at word ends – while many British speakers drop it. That divergence occurred because dropping the “R” became fashionable in London after the first American colonies were founded, fueled by rapid 19th-century social change.

Once accents are established, particularly in adulthood, changing the way one talks is extremely difficult.

Learning a new language requires creating novel sounds that may be hard to hear or reproduce. English speakers often miss Swahili’s “mb” sound, inserting a vowel. Spanish speakers may hear a vowel before English words starting with “st” like “student” and add it in speech.

To sound like native speakers, learners must also mimic a language’s prosody – its rhythms, tones and stresses. Americans typically increase duration and loudness on emphasized words and lower pitch at sentence ends to signal completion, Fridland writes. Mandarin, by contrast, is syllable-timed, with tone essential to word meaning.

Even in one’s native language, changing an accent is challenging. An American moving to Surrey is unlikely to sound truly English; instead, they may develop a “blended dialect,” Fridland said. “When people are long-term residents of a dialect area that’s not their own, we do find something called speech accommodation that happens, which is where they move closer to the norms of that region without actually replicating the norms very well.”

The effect strengthens with community ties – as seen with writer Bill Bryson, who grew up in the U.S. but has lived most of his adult life in the U.K. Even within a single conversation, speakers’ pitch, accent and vocabulary may converge slightly, Fridland noted.

Given the deep roots of accents, judging people by them is unfair, yet it persists consciously or unconsciously.

In the 2012 trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, the prosecution’s key witness, Rachel Jeantel, spoke with a strong African American Vernacular English accent. Fridland wrote that she was “largely dismissed as incomprehensible and not credible.” Linguists John R. Rickford and Sharese King reported in 2016 that Jeantel testified for six hours – longer than any other witness – but was not mentioned in jury deliberations. “In a sense, Jeantel’s dialect was found guilty as a prelude to and contributing element in Zimmerman’s acquittal,” they wrote.

Similar cases have occurred in the U.K. A 2022 study found that people with working-class accents are more likely to be suspected of crimes. “There’s a really good, solid body of literature that suggests that having a non-standard accented speaker or heavily regionally accented speaker can influence credibility ratings of jurors and, in fact, increase attribution of guilt,” Fridland said.

Simple measures can minimize harm. Recognizing biases helps; studies show benefits when employers focus on a person’s capabilities rather than speech. Even a desire to avoid appearing biased can mitigate prejudice. Linguists have helped develop jury instructions to reduce accent bias.

Ultimately, Fridland said, the way we talk stems from a universal need for social belonging. In her experience, “most people are genuine in wanting to be better listeners.”

“There are some assholes out there, but the majority of people, I think, given the right tools, want to do better.”