Attitudes to Accents - Article

My article will be targeted towards Mail readers.

"Disguise Your Accent" Says Darth Vader Actor
Could your accent be preventing you from getting a job?

Judging people based on their accent is nothing new. We've all made silly, unfounded judgement about others based on the way they speak, even if we know it's wrong. In an age where it is so stigmatised to judge or treat anyone differently based on their race, sex, or appearance, especially in the employment process, then why is it that the same stigma isn't attached to accents?
According to an ITV/Comres study 28% of Britons feel 'discriminated against' due to their accents.
To complement this worrying statistic, a report by the legal firm Peninsular has revealed that a staggering 80% admit to making discriminatory decisions based on accent. With such a wealth of statistics backing up this claim, which accents are most affected?
With accents such as RP (Received Pronunciation) and Estuary English being most favourable, classically 'rougher' accents such as the Birmingham and Liverpool accents, which are widely received as hostile, unfriendly or even unintelligent.
When put on paper, in black & white, like this, the idea that it's so widely accepted that it is not a problem to discriminate based on accent seems abhorrent, yet it is still considered fine.
There is currently no legislation in place to prevent discrimination based on accent, as there is with factors such as race and gender.
While discrimination based on these characteristics may seem much worse, surely accent is just as influential. After all, everyone has one!

Nowadays it is not uncommon to see (or rather, hear) people actively attempting to soften, or altogether change, their accents in order to seem more appealing. This doesn't just go for the job market, but in general social situations. We would surely see a problem if we lived in an age where people were overtly ashamed of their race, so why should we allow it with accent, which is just as much a part of our identity as anything else?

This problem spreads throughout all industries, even high-profile jobs such as acting. When auditions were being held for the new Star Wars film in Bristol we spoke to David Prowse, the local legend best known for playing Darth Vader in the original trilogy. Shockingly, his advice to any aspiring cast member was to "disguise" their accents if they wanted any chance at a role.
So, with even the famous required to change their accents to make it, it may seem as though there is little hope for accents in the future, but that remains to be seen. In an almost subconscious response to the dilution of accents in modern times, many regional accents are making a serious resurgence, in what seems like an act of defiance against this discrimination.
Although it is still unclear, it should be interesting to see where this train of thought as a society takes us.
More importantly, what do you, the people with the accents think?

Accent & Dialect Research Task - 'Trudgill's 1974 Norwich study of the effect of class on accent'

What is it?
This study was carried out by sociolinguist academic Peter Trudgill in 1974.
The study involved Trudgill studying speech in Norwich in order to find out how and why people's way of speaking varied. He based his study on the independent variables of the gender and class of the subjects.

Who was studied?
Trudgill used zone sampling when conducting this study. He took ten speakers from the five electoral wards of Norwich, as well as ten children from two different schools. He focused on age and class sampling, with sixty subjects in total.

Results
The most commonly cited result of Trudgill's study is in probably his findings in relation to the usage of the suffix -ng.
In standard English, words ending in the consonant '-ng' such as: walking and talking, end with a 'Velar nasal' (the common -ng sound) However, Trudgill found that in Norwich these words are often pronounced as if there was just an '-n' on the end. For example: "walkin' and talkin'"

Trudgill notes that this feature is by no means exclusive to Norwich:
"Nearly everywhere in the Eng-speaking world we find this alternation between higher-class/formal ng and lower class/informal n. It goes back to the fact that in Old English (and later) there were two forms, a gerund ending in -ing (walking is good for you) and a present participle ending in -end (he was walking). The -end form was the ancestor of -n' and -ing(obviously) of -ing."

Trudgill then goes on to talk about how the two variations merged, 'fairly recently' he says, within the last 300 years.

Trudgill made several notable conclusions from his research. These include:

1. In all social classes, people were more likely to say walking when they were speaking carefully.
2. Walkin' type forms had a higher proportion in the lower classes.
3. the non-standard -in forms appeared much more often in men than in women, a trend that stayed true through all of the social classes.
4. When asked, women tended to say that they thought they had been using the standard -ing more often than they actually did.
5. Conversely, when asked, men said the opposite.

 

Trudgill's figures for social class and sex differences in the use of the standard -ing form in Norwich when people used a formal style of speaking are as follows:

Bibliography
Peter Trudgill's 1974 The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich
http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/norwich.html
https://prezi.com/qfd-eiu5zf51/peter-trudgill-and-the-norwich-study-1974/
https://aggslanguage.wordpress.com/4-4-%E2%80%93-the-basic-variation-theorists-%E2%80%93-labov-trudgill-cheshire-millroy-bernstein/