Accents and their Meaning

Accents and Power Relations

People naturally have different ways of talking and saying things, though a given instance may or may not constitute a genuine accent. Speech accommodation studies conducted by Leslie M. Beebe and Howard Giles suggest that some people have attitudes about the particular way others speak, regardless of who the speaker may be. Research by critical race theorist Mari J. Matsuda suggests that the way people speak is often judged by others to measure their social, cultural, political, or economic orientation. She maintains that accents are used to create hierarchies of power in the social structure of a community and to determine a person's social standing in a particular nation or region. Matsuda claims that the judgments that are made about a person's speech go beyond the issue of linguistic competence and represent attitudes and beliefs about the person's social, cultural, political, and economic individuality.

Language constitutes an important part of people's identity, and the way people sound when they speak is [Page 5]an important component of their sense of belonging to a given time and space. It may not be an exaggeration to suggest that everybody speaks with an accent; what may sound “funny” or “strange” to one person may sound normal to another depending on the national, regional, and cultural context in which speech takes place. In the same way, acceptance of accents is relative to the context and the culture in which those accents are most often heard. According to the principles of cultural relativism as discussed by the anthropologist Franz Boas, an individual's behavior, beliefs, and language make sense only if interpreted in the context of that individual's culture.

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