Higher Education and Working-Class Academics by Teresa Crew

Author:Teresa Crew
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030583521
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The ‘Wrong’ Accent

One’s grammar, semantics and vocabulary may vary, but an accent is something particular to the locality in which its speakers reside. Linguistic prejudice has been documented against speakers of regional dialects and various racial or ethnic groups. In a survey of attitudes towards 38 different British accents, Indian accents received low ratings (Sharma 2019). In her interview, Saira, a senior research fellow, also an Indian working-class academic said that her ‘strong’ Indian accent had been commented on when giving a presentation. There is a long tradition of using “brown voice” for caricature. ‘Apu’, a recurring character in the animated TV series The Simpsons has long been seen as a racist stereotype and Donald Trump’s reported mockery of Narendra Modi’s accent being yet another high-profile example (Amin 2018). When Saira highlighted this linguistic prejudice, she was greeted with accusations of being oversensitive. As we will see later in this chapter, this is a typical response faced by ethnic minorities.

My respondents also reported being stigmatised for their regional accents, particularly if they were ‘northern’ or ‘welsh’:I presented at a UK conference , the top scientific one in my field. An audience member puts up her hand and says: “I’m finding it very hard to follow you as you are talking in a regional manner”. Upset I mentioned it to my supervisor who was at the same conference . Rather than be sympathetic he asked if I could tone it down? [Polly, a lecturer in Medical Sciences at a red brick institution]

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