Does Britain still have a problem with accent bias?

The Accent Bias Britain team investigated accent bias in a series of four studies:

• attitudes to accent labels (the words typically used to describe different accents)

  • rated by listeners for prestige and pleasantness

• attitudes to real voices (in mock job interview answers)

  • Received Pronunciation (RP); Estuary English (EE); Multicultural London English (MLE); General Northern English (GNE); Urban West Yorkshire English (UWYE)

  • rated by listeners for hireability using a range of questions

• attitudes to accents at work (in a mock hiring exercise )

• potential interventions to combat bias 

The results of the study of attitudes to real voices found that older speakers were more likely to rate accents more harshly than younger speakers. We can see this in the figure here which shows accent ratings on the vertical axis (from 1-7, where 7 is 'good') and age of the listeners on the horizontal axis. 

People’s attitudes about accents tend to conform increasingly to established norms as they enter the workforce and get older. Coupland and Bishop (2007) investigated attitudes towards British accents and found a similar trend, which suggests that this pattern is an example of age grading.

Accent bias is a persistent feature of language attitudes in the UK. 

The Accent Bias Britain project investigated potential interventions to combat bias and found that a simple awareness-raising task was the most effective. You can read about that part of the study, and take a 20 minute tutorial for students, on the Accent Bias Britain project website.