Read the passage below and check your comprehension by answering the following questions. Then “submit” your work.
English may be a common language, but each of us actually speaks it somewhat differently. A sweet southern drawl, for example, sounds markedly different from the rapid clip of a native New Yorker, and neither accent sounds much like the Midwesterner voice of the anchor on the nightly news. For better or worse, our dialects carry with them certain baggage. When we open our mouths to speak, we are conveying not only the specific message we intended to share, but often also a wealth of information about who we are.
Whether we recognize it or not, most of us speak with some sort of regional accent that is intrinsically tied to the place where we live. Our speech is also affected by ethnic background and socioeconomic status — what linguists call social dialect (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes, 2006). In any case, we might be judged harshly based on the way that we speak: Americans, for example, tend to perceive Midwesterner accents as the most “correct,” whereas strong southern and New York City accents are perceived as signs of lower intelligence (Preston, 1998). The less fluent you seem to your audience, the less credible they perceive you (Podlipský, Šimá, & Petráž, 2016). Similar judgments are common in almost every culture. In the United Kingdom, BBC business reporter Stephanie McGovern notes that her northern accent, which is perceived in England as being “common” or “working class,” elicits a strong reaction from viewers as well as others in the industry. “I’ve had tweets questioning whether I really did go to university,” McGovern says, “because surely I would have lost my accent if I did; a letter suggesting, very politely, that I get correction therapy; and an email saying I should get back to my council estate [the British term for a public housing project] and leave the serious work to the clever folk” (McGovern, quoted in Duell, 2013).
That is why many people whose jobs require public speaking go to great pains to shed their regional accents. Many of them head to speech coaches like the late Sam Chwat, the “speech coach to the stars,” whose clients included the actors Robert DeNiro and Julia Roberts as well as a host of corporate executives and public figures who need to unlearn their hometown accent — or learn a new one (Woo, 2011).