How Accent Discrimination Reinforces America’s Deepest Divides
From The Observatory
Source: The Observatory
The American Southern accent reveals how linguistic prejudice reinforces classism, regionalism, and subconscious bias across generations.
This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.
“How Accent Discrimination Reinforces America’s Deepest Divides” by Madeline VanArsdale is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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[Author’s note: IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. It is an alphabet of symbols, not entirely unlike the Latin alphabet, which is used to guide pronunciation. For more information about IPA, please visit this link.]
Introduction
For as long as humans have existed, we have defined ourselves in contrast to an “other”—a person or group who possesses a characteristic that is perceived as different. This impulse has shaped our communities since the moment we began to form them. Across the ancient world, warring tribes treated differences as a threat. The Roman Empire labeled states throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East as enemies to be conquered, enslaved, or absorbed. When colonizers arrived in the Americas, they cast Indigenous peoples as savage and primitive, and placed themselves in the opposing position as the embodiment of sophistication and civility.
When othering those of foreign backgrounds became too conventional, societies began turning that impulse inward. Regency-era English nobility labeled themselves “the Ton,” using wealth to distinguish themselves from the lower class. India’s strict caste system has divided people of different class statuses for thousands of years. To this day, some Northern Italians turn their noses up at Southern Italians, while those in southern China extend similar treatment to their northern counterparts.
The seed of “othering” is also deeply rooted in religion. Catholics and Protestants in 16th- and 17th-century Europe warred for hundreds of years, with lasting effects evident in England and Northern Ireland even today. In Middle Eastern countries, tension between Sunni and Shia Muslims has resulted in regional rifts.
Tribes, empires, countries, and cities alike have upheld humanity’s tradition of othering like a torch in the night. The concept of “us versus them” has persisted throughout history and across the globe. As psychosocial rehabilitation specialist Kendra Cherry explains,
“Othering is a phenomenon in which some individuals or groups are defined and labeled as not fitting in within the norms of a social group… [it] is a way of negating another person’s humanity. Consequently, people who are othered are seen as less worthy of dignity and respect.”
Othering stems from a variety of attributes, such as skin color, gender, nationality, occupation, religion, class status, political affiliation, language, and more—characteristics by which we classify ourselves as belonging to a specific group and, therefore, place others into a different one. This phenomenon bleeds into every aspect of culture and community, and language communities are certainly not exempt. The subtlety of linguistic discrimination has allowed it to persist where other, more brazen forms of bias have been denounced, expelled, and unlearned. As one form of language bias, accent discrimination flies dangerously under the radar in conversations about implicit bias and creeps into even the most well-meaning and inclusive minds.
Labov’s Landmark Study
In 1962, American linguist William Labov conducted a landmark study on social class, employment, and dialect. His simple yet effective method involved visiting New York City department stores and speaking with employees across different job levels, from managers to clerks to janitors. By prompting them to say a specific word containing the /ɹ/ sound (as in “floor”), he tested—and proved—his theory: the higher an employee’s social class, the more likely they were to pronounce the /ɹ/ and adopt speech patterns associated with Standard American English.
Manual laborers, such as janitors, were more likely to drop the rhotic /ɹ/ from their speech, a common trait of metropolitan New York English. A classic example of this dialect is the popular phrase, “Hey, I’m walking here!” Or, spelled out in phonetic symbolization, with regard to the New York dialect: /eɪ aɪm wɑkɪn ijə/. The point of this study is to show that different occupations, even within a single company, develop unique cultures and can create distinct divides among roles.
Due to these cultural self-selections, people may perceive particular dialects and ways of speaking as good or bad, wise or stupid, friendly or unapproachable, and so on. Assumptions are made, prejudices form, and eventually, distinct “high” and “low” dialects are established, giving rise to linguistic societal discrimination.
American Southern Accent
In the same stroke, this kind of widespread language prejudice can occur nationally and globally. A prime example is the American Southern accent. The rest of the United States and the world have long slighted the Southern accent. People often mimic it to portray someone or something as unintelligent.
Movies, television, books, and media have reinforced this negative stereotype of the Southern accent. For example, the beloved titular character from the 1994 film Forrest Gump perfectly encapsulates the essence of a stereotypical Southerner: unintellectual, oblivious, undereducated, happy-go-lucky, and overtly friendly. Despite several other characters in the movie having Southern accents, Gump’s is dramatized and highly drawn out to emphasize his Southern roots.
If you pay attention, the portrayal (and lack thereof) of Southern accents across various media forms tells the story of the American South through the eyes (and ears) of those unfamiliar with it.
The popular sitcom “Young Sheldon” features a family from East Texas, particularly an erudite young boy. You may notice that Sheldon is the only person in his family who speaks Standard American English. This dialect is considered articulate, with a superfluous vocabulary that occasionally creates a communication barrier with his family, all of whom speak a general Southern dialect. Perhaps it’s purely a coincidence that Sheldon starts college at the age of 11, while the rest of his family shows little to no interest in higher education and sometimes struggles to understand his scholarly jargon.
Even more insidious than the stigmatization of the Southern accent is its erasure entirely. The popular Netflix series “Outer Banks” is set on a chain of islands off the coast of North Carolina. In this area, geographical isolation has given rise to a unique dialect known as “High Tider,” spoken by the locals. The people of this area claim ancestry from Scottish, Irish, and English settlers who rarely interacted with those on the mainland, thereby creating a language community independent of the rest of the continent. The characters on the show itself, however, have no trace of the High Tider dialect in their speech; instead, they use Standard American English.
Erasing the region’s local speech patterns reinforces stereotypes and deepens subconscious linguistic othering. Characters who defy the typical Southern stereotype are almost always written and performed without the accent—traits like intelligence, attractiveness, and wit are rarely associated with a Southern drawl because it doesn’t align with the audience’s expectations.
Southern Vowel Shift
In 2021, researchers Jon Forrest, Steve McDonald, and Robin Dodsworth published a paper in the journal Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World that examined variation in dialects of the American South across employment sectors. The researchers used data from the Raleigh Corpus, which comprises interviews with residents of Raleigh, North Carolina, who were born and raised in the area. By talking to people of various ages, genders, races, ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, and employment paths, several features emerged regarding the intersection of accent and occupation.
The most notable observation was that, as demand and popularity for technology jobs increased, the use of pronunciation features that were characteristic of the Southern vowel shift declined dramatically. This pattern is the relaxation of vowels in the Southern accent; vowels can stray from their standard tenseness and laxness, and can also be “fronted” or pronounced further forward in the mouth. For example, a person from the South might pronounce the word “rice” as “rass” (/ɹæs/) and say the word “pen” as “pin” (/pɪn/). The Southern vowel shift is a staple feature of the Southern accent and is (or was) especially prominent in Raleigh. Following Raleigh’s emergence as a technology hub in the 1960s, the advent of modern technology, and the growing job market for employees in those fields, the Southern vowel shift began to diminish within that particular workforce.
One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the language associated with technology leaves less room for individuality and personality. Therefore, those working in that industry would begin adopting a more standardized accent. Another reason is that the realm of technology is vastly more globally connected in terms of the types of people who work within that sphere. This means those speaking with a Southern accent are exposed to many other national and global accents. This melting pot of dialects can affect the way someone speaks and, as a result, may reduce the Southern accent they were raised with.
According to Dodsworth, the influx of workers and their families led to a “dialect contact situation” in Raleigh and its neighboring cities.
“Through her analysis of K-12 networks in Raleigh, Dodsworth found correlations between the increasing social diversity of the city and the slow ‘leveling’ of its traditional accents. It also helped to explain why rural areas—or even the parts of Raleigh that saw the least inward migration—remain the most Southern-sounding,” according to a National Science Foundation report on the study.
Several other observations from Forrest et al.’s 2021 study further explored the ties between employment and accent in Raleigh. As previously discussed, those in the technical field were less likely to maintain a Southern accent. Law and government workers experienced a similar decrease, but to a lesser extent. Service workers, also known as “blue-collar” workers, were the most likely to retain Southern accent features. Additionally, across all industries, research showed that the older an employee was, the more likely they were to have a Southern accent.
This is partially because, in simple terms, old habits die hard. Older people, those who established careers before the advent of the digital age, are more likely to retain their Southern accents because of the culture and heritage associated with it. Although young people may be connected to Southern culture, they have not lived as long as their predecessors and are more susceptible to subconscious linguistic adaptation. Additionally, with the increase in immigration and ease of movement, many people in Raleigh likely come from places outside the South and have brought different accents, dialects, and languages with them.
Globalization has transformed homogeneous language communities into more diverse places, both linguistically and in other respects. The increased ease of travel, trade, and the spread of ideas and knowledge have brought people and their accents from all over the world into communities that were previously relatively isolated, such as North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
Tracing the Roots: How History, Class, and Media Shaped Biases Against the Southern Accent
There are several reasons why a person might hear a Southern accent and subject the speaker to the typical stereotypes associated with it. As with many linguistic theories, there is rarely a single, straightforward answer to this question. The nature of this kind of research requires a deep understanding of psychology, history, sociology, linguistics (of course), and many other complex subjects to fully comprehend the scope of the topic.
One popular theory dates back to the American Civil War. Before the Civil War, the South did not have nearly as much linguistic variation as it does today. Back then, the Southern accent was heavily influenced by the “prestigious” accents of the English colonizers. Today’s Southern accent shares few similarities with the “original” dialect.
Walt Wolfram, co-author of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina and professor at North Carolina State University, makes several points on the evolution of the American Southern accent. According to Wolfram, the South’s loss at the end of the Civil War, along with the prospect of a new life in the North, drove many Southerners to abandon the South. Many who remained did so because they did not have the means to leave or because of the institution of “Southern pride.” Additionally, the racial divide in the South (especially after the Civil War) drove the white and Black populations apart culturally and linguistically, causing both groups to develop certain aspects of speech that would further distinguish one from the other.
As we have seen before in many cases, ways of speaking associated with lower social classes are often vilified and disparaged. And in the case of the post-slavery South, that meant primarily newly freed slaves, who had little to no money or land, and had no other choice but to stay. The specificities of the Black Southern dialect, combined with the white dialect and the various creoles and dialects from the African and South American slave trades, began to merge.
Several factors were in play simultaneously, like the impending stress and uncertainty during the South’s Reconstruction era, the lack of people migrating to the South, and the millions of recently freed former slaves, many of whom used speech that was influenced by other languages. These social elements now had a significant influence on the formation of new dialects, and the Southern dialect underwent a complete transformation. Due to cultural and geographical differences, numerous variations of the “standard” Southern dialect emerged, resulting in the modern Southern accents we know today. Though no clear explanation exists for how these accents are discriminated against, several possibilities arise from this Civil War-based theory.
One possibility is that the war’s effects on the relationship between the North and the South caused non-Southerners to disdain the Southern accent due to the political divide. Another possibility is that the accent became embroiled in Northern classism against the poor in the South. A final possibility, with similar roots, is that with the large population of African Americans in the South, along with their use of the Southern accent, non-Southerners correlated their racism with the Southern accent. These possible explanations have been perpetuated across generations and are still successfully maintained today, demonstrating just how implicit and invalid language biases can be.
Another, more modern explanation for this bias exists. A 2012 study by Katherine D. Kinzler and Jasmine M. DeJesus presents two perspectives on Southerners: Children from non-Southern states generally held a bias against Southern accents and associated the “standard” dialect with greater education, intelligence, and so on, while children from the South did not prefer one accent over the other. As Southern children grew older and became more exposed to media, they, too, began to develop prejudices against their own dialect. While local news reporters and other adults in a child’s life sound like them, few national voices carry the same Southern accent; news reporters, television show hosts, celebrities, and political figures mostly have non-Southern accents.
Over time, these children were conditioned to think that, since they don’t hear many Southern voices in these spaces, individuals with a Northern accent must be smarter, more authoritative, and generally better. Non-Southern children, seeing the same national media, are rarely exposed to Southern accents and are used to people who sound like them being the ones in charge. Children naturally learn from observing the adults in their lives, which continues the cycle of self-deprecation regarding dialect.
Despite the lack of statistical correlation between Southern accents and intelligence or capability, the stereotype persists across the U.S. and beyond. Its roots are complex, shaped by centuries of historical prejudice, regional divisions, and systemic classism, and continually reinforced by media portrayals that favor standardized speech. These biases ripple outward, affecting not only workplace dynamics but also education, social interactions, and even self-perception among Southerners themselves. Recognizing and challenging accent discrimination is more than a matter of politeness—it is a step toward dismantling deep-seated assumptions about worth, ability, and identity. By listening carefully and valuing linguistic diversity, we can begin to unlearn these prejudices and create a society where a voice’s sound reflects individuality rather than judgment.
