Fighting accent bias is everyone’s job, not just accented speakers’

By Gento Okawa, PhD student, Linguistics, Simon Fraser University
Lin Lu, PhD student, Applied Linguistics, Concordia University
Mary Grantham O'Brien, Professor of Linguistics; Vice-Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, Simon Fraser University
Ryuichi Suzuki, PhD student in Education (Applied Linguistics), Concordia University

People who speak with an accent know it can lead to discrimination. It can cost them in job interviews, at work and in everyday exchanges. But what they usually have to go on is anecdote: their own experiences and those of people they know.

Interestingly, research demonstrates that listeners can often understand accented speech well. Yet those findings rarely reach accented speakers themselves or the practitioners who make important decisions that affect their lives, such as hiring managers.

That disconnect…

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