Group items tagged

This opinion article entails accents, and how they are interpreted. The author, a Spanish immigrant who works at Dartmouth as a language professor claims that accents are universal. He states that everyone has an accent, but here in the US people who don't have the "normal" or "regular" accent are viewed as different. He goes on to say that Americans tend to discriminate against people with accents different from their own more than in other countries. He wants to remind people that accents are irrelevant, and urges people to accept all accents no matter how different from their own.

This article analyzes how accent discrimination has become a problem. People often discriminate when an accent or someone's name is foreign. We also embrace that our words should sound a certain way and even though everyone has an accent, we struggle to have an open mind with those who have a different accent than us.

The correlation of foreign accents with "bad" characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States. The most wicked foreign accent of all was British English, according to the study. From Scar to Aladdin's Jafar, the study found that British is the foreign accent most commonly used for villains. German and Slavic accents are also common for villain voices. Henchmen or assistants to villains often spoke in dialects associated with low socioeconomic status, including working-class Eastern European dialects or regional American dialects such as "Italian-American gangster" (like when Claude in Captain Planet says 'tuh-raining' instead of 'training.') None of the villains in the sample studied seemed to speak Standard American English; when they did speak with an American accent, it was always in regional dialects associated with low socioeconomic status.

This opinion piece explains all people have accents. Accents are based off many different factors but our society believes there is a "native" and "non-native" voice.

Gawker is running a competition, tournament style, to see which accent will be crowned "America's Ugliest." In the running are 16 cities in the US, and readers get to vote. Accent discrimination still thrives... Josef Fruehwald, the linguist author of this article, states, "Linguists call this general pattern "standard language ideology." It's the idea that somewhere out there, there's a perfect, unadulterated version of English, and what your everyday person speaks is a poor copy. I call it the kilogram model of language, because there is literally a physical object in France by which the unit kilogram is defined, and there are in fact multiple and worryingly imperfect copies of it around the world. But what linguists have discovered is that language is definitely not like the kilogram. The only place where English really exists is in the minds of its everyday speakers. To the extent that varies geographically and socially, so does English. There are no imperfect copies."

For 30 years, Robert Siegel has pretty much been the voice of All Things Considered. He steps down from the host chair on Jan. 5, 2018. During his career, one of the recurrent themes of his reporting has been language - and how we speak. This article documents several of Robert Siegel's language-related stories, including a 1993 article on "uptalk," an interview with a voice coach who teaches rock stars to scream without shredding their vocal cords, an interview with sociolinguist William Labov on New York accents, and Donald Trump's vocabulary and language.

Not everyone who speaks English is treated the same way. What happens when accent discrimination creeps in to our conscious and unconscious - and what do we do about our biases?

Learning a second language is usually difficult and often when we speak it, we cannot disguise our origin or accent. However, there are important differences between individuals with regard to the degree to which a second language is mastered, even for people who have lived in a bilingual environment since childhood. Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC) linked to the Barcelona Science Park, have studied these differences. By comparing people who are able to perceive a second language as if they were native speakers of that language with people who find it very difficult to do so, they have observed that the former group is also better at distinguishing the sounds of their own native language. The study results show that there is a positive correlation between specific speech discrimination abilities and the ability to learn a second language, which means that the individual ability to distinguish the specific phonemes of the language, both in the case of the mother tongue and in the case of other languages, is, without a doubt, a decisive factor in the learning process, and the ability to speak and master other languages."