> but I still have a distinct bias against certain regional accents
Why? First thing you learn in linguistics 101 is that everyone has an accent and there is no "good" or "bad" dialect. What is so hard about internalizing this for most people?
In the US, if you live on the coasts, most southern accents you’ll hear tend to be comedic relief, uneducated, unsophisticated portrayals in tv/movies. It is unconsciously drilled into the culture that a southern accent is a sign of poor education. It’s hard to fight all that unconscious reinforcement as much as people may intellectually agree that accentism is bad.
I don’t want to get political but it doesn’t help that it’s mostly southern states trying to eliminate evolution curriculums and other anti-science stances...
Being taught something != actually feeling something. You can say "that's bad" and people will repeat after you in agreement. Doesn't mean the voice in the back of their mind actually agrees or can just flip like a switch. Decades of thinking that are slowly ironed in don't just go away in an instant.
It didn't flip a switch for me because I never had any bias against someone for their accent. My question is why has this false, irrational belief about accents persisted for so long in America? There are tons of people in this thread talking about their bias, and I don't understand what led them to that state of mind in the first place.
The article is about this being a global phenomenon, with emphasis on France and the UK. Weird to believe that this is any worse in America than it is anywhere else.
It's human nature to have an in-group and out-group. Sometimes it's as simple as language. Generally, anyone who claims they have absolutely no bias against X people for Y characteristic aren't aware of their own biases.
> Anyone who pretends they have no bias against X people for Y characteristic just isn't aware of their own biases.
Bias is easier to mitigate when you ignore any generalization about any large group of people, such as a linguistic group. Human nature is no excuse for having delusions about an accent.
Even if it was a valid argument that Linguistics 101 cured people of their prejudice... what percentage of people do you think take a Linguistics 101 course?
Why? First thing you learn in linguistics 101 is that everyone has an accent and there is no "good" or "bad" dialect. What is so hard about internalizing this for most people?