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Comment by claudeganon | Hacker News Reader

It’s not impossible to end. Just have people learn other languages. Once you yourself have struggled with a bad accent and different pronunciation from most people, I think your view tends to change. Monolingualism is the bane of just about every kind of intellectual development and diversity.

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I don't agree. I can speak 2 foreign languages (that I learned in adulthood) and read 2 others, but I still have a distinct bias against certain regional accents - though only USA regional accents. I can't distinguish any other countries regional accents (or if I can, they all sound good to me).

I can only speak one other (Japanese) and have found the exact opposite. Growing up in the north, I had a strong bias against southern accents, which were almost exclusively treated with disdain by everyone around me. This disappeared after I had to struggle through learning to speak a language quite foreign from my own and where I was helped immensely by people who spoke varying degrees of accented English.

But I think this was also colored by my adult experience of being mocked in academic and professional setting for certain aspects of my speech (most often mispronunciations of foreign, historical or place names that I had only read in books, having had no other exposure to them from my working class family). This kind of mockery always seemed so stupid and low that to hold on to it in anyway myself became repulsive.

> but I still have a distinct bias against certain regional accents

Why? First thing you learn in linguistics 101 is that everyone has an accent and there is no "good" or "bad" dialect. What is so hard about internalizing this for most people?

This is a joke, right?

Being taught something != actually feeling something. You can say "that's bad" and people will repeat after you in agreement. Doesn't mean the voice in the back of their mind actually agrees or can just flip like a switch. Decades of thinking that are slowly ironed in don't just go away in an instant.

It didn't flip a switch for me because I never had any bias against someone for their accent. My question is why has this false, irrational belief about accents persisted for so long in America? There are tons of people in this thread talking about their bias, and I don't understand what led them to that state of mind in the first place.

The article is about this being a global phenomenon, with emphasis on France and the UK. Weird to believe that this is any worse in America than it is anywhere else.

It's human nature to have an in-group and out-group. Sometimes it's as simple as language. Generally, anyone who claims they have absolutely no bias against X people for Y characteristic aren't aware of their own biases.

> Anyone who pretends they have no bias against X people for Y characteristic just isn't aware of their own biases.

Bias is easier to mitigate when you ignore any generalization about any large group of people, such as a linguistic group. Human nature is no excuse for having delusions about an accent.

> My question is why has this false, irrational belief about accents persisted for so long in America?

> Bias is easier to mitigate when you ignore any generalization about any large group of people

Hmmmmm...

In the US, if you live on the coasts, most southern accents you’ll hear tend to be comedic relief, uneducated, unsophisticated portrayals in tv/movies. It is unconsciously drilled into the culture that a southern accent is a sign of poor education. It’s hard to fight all that unconscious reinforcement as much as people may intellectually agree that accentism is bad.

I don’t want to get political but it doesn’t help that it’s mostly southern states trying to eliminate evolution curriculums and other anti-science stances...

40%* of America lives on the coast.

* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html

That includes the Gulf of Mexico and a lot of the South, Houston, New Orleans, Florida etc

> Why? First thing you learn in linguistics 101

Even if it was a valid argument that Linguistics 101 cured people of their prejudice... what percentage of people do you think take a Linguistics 101 course?

Ironically, I have a bachelors in Linguistics. There is a world of difference between knowing something and internalizing it.

-I speak English (my third language) with a marked Aberdinian accent - despite never having lived there; this is courtesy of the kids next door when I was a child - their family had moved from Aberdeen to rural Norway, and if I wanted to play with them, I had better learn how to speak English. (And for a couple of years, said kids were the only teachers around...)

I have tried to lose the accent, but I still get asked by Aberdeen locals how long I've lived there whenever I visit for work.

Good thing the kids next door were from Aberdeen and not the Outer Hebrides, methinks. :)

Kenyans speak 3 languages: English, Kiswahili and the language of the people one is descended from: Maasai etc.

Competency is usually skewed one side or the other: more educated people usually speak good English (often in an accent they like to imagine sounds british or american) Swahili neutrally, and the native language poorly. Less educated people speak bad English, Swahili neutrally (everyone speaks it virtually all the time), and the native language very well.

Does being multilingual limit accentism? Not even a little. Kenyans who know they can't speak a word of Luhya/Meru/Kipsigis will think less of you if you speak English with a Luhya/Meru or Kipsigis accent and actually will try to teach you how to speak in a less embarrassing way.

"have people learn other languages"

We can't even convince people to get vaccinated, or wear masks during a pandemic

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