Read the text to answer question.
“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth
without making some other Englishman despise him,”
playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface to
Pygmalion in 1913. Recent headlines suggest that accent
prejudice (or “accentism”) is no relic of the past but continues
to blight the university experience of many students.
There is a hierarchy of accents in Britain which has
changed little over the years. The accents of Britain’s highest
classes are seen as neutral, “accentless” and correct,
while others are seen as inferior and are often stigmatised.
As such, those who have “non-standard” accents are
seen as legitimate and admissible targets for comment
and judgement. They are also loaded with an apparent
responsibility to change how they sound.
The higher-class standard accent — “Received
Pronunciation” (RP) — is consistently rated the highest
on scales such as prestige and perceived intelligence.
Such judgments continually reproduce and reaffirm social
inequalities.
The association between the ability to speak in a
certain way and being intelligent is especially relevant in the
university context, where this particular trait is most valued.
Being able to sound intelligent in a classroom translates
directly into gaining recognition and respect amongst peers
and teachers. The repercussions of accentism in the job
market are a further consequence for students.
University is a place and a time where people come
together from all over the country and all over the world. This
can have very interesting effects on students’ accents as
they might naturally start to change the way that they speak
due to their new surroundings. This is a completely normal
process known as accommodation. It is not the same thing
as the enforced undermining of credibility and intelligence
through the stereotyping of someone’s regional accent.
There are many interesting things to learn about how
someone from another part of the country has a different
way of pronouncing a word or uses a different word for
the same thing. For instance, have you ever seen how
many different words there are for a bread roll? We need
to counteract our biases by understanding and celebrating
such diversity, instead of ridiculing those who don’t conform
to an ideological standard rooted in discrimination from
the start.
(Monika Schmid, Amanda Cole and Ella Jeffries.
www.theconversation.com, 26.10.2020. Adapted.)
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