Definition:
The perception that certain accents are inferior to others.
See also:
Examples and Observations:
- "I learned to change my accent; in England, your accent identifies you very strongly with a class, and I did not want to be held back."
(Sting) - "Just as errors, both of grammar and of word choice, are condemned as simply wrong by those who wish to uphold standards, so some accents of English (e.g. Birmingham, Broad Australian) are stigmatised as ugly and uneducated. There are, of course, no intrinsic grounds for such stigmatising, any more than there are for racial prejudice. Those who see accent prejudice as solely a language problem are inclined to wax indignant, to maintain that all accents are equal (forgetting perhaps the continuation of the Animal Farm motto: but some are more equal than others). For them, therefore, there is no problem: society has the duty to behave differently and overcome its prejudices. The applied linguist, however, is likely to recognise that it is indeed a problem and that it extends beyond language, reflecting social and political (and possibly ethnic) values."
(Alan Davies, An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: From Practice to Theory, 2nd ed. Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2007) - "I used to say that whenever people heard my Southern accent, they always wanted to deduct 100 IQ points."
(Jeff Foxworthy) - "Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys."
(Max von Sydow) - "'Received Pronunciation' (RP: traditionally the highest-status variety in England) is sometimes stigmatized. Its speakers may be perceived as 'posh' or 'snobbish' . . . and their accents as reflective of an 'elitist discoursal stance.' Young people in particular, it is suggested, are now likely to repudiate 'attitudes that sustained accent prejudice.'"
(John Edwards, Language Diversity in the Classroom. Multilingual Matters, 2010)
