Devyani Sharma on Accents

What does your accent – and yes, every speaker has one – say about you? Or perhaps the better question is, what do others hear in your accent? These are the sorts of questions that Devyani Sharma, a professor of language and communication at Oxford's Worcester College, asks every day, especially about the many English speakers around the world. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sharma takes a deep dive into the accents of Britain, where accents have famously been used as markers of social status for years. As she tells interviewer David Edmonds, "the UK stands out as a country that's organized its whole social system around accent for a very long time." While that's been true historically, Sharma's own research and public service – through projects like Generations of London English, Dialect Development and Style in a Diasporic Community, and the Accent Bias Britain online resource – has helped reduce the negatives around that. As she details for Edmonds, "Interestingly, just a reminder that 'you might be relying on accent as a shortcut and please don't' was enough to change recruiters' behavior. It doesn't always happen with gender and race anymore, and my sense is that's because the message has been saturated. People are annoyed to be reminded before doing a recruiting task, but they haven't thought as much about how much they use accent when judging people."