In the article “Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility” they describe the fact that because “non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech, […] this “processing difficulty” causes non-native speakers to sound less credible”(Lev-Ari, 2010) they tested this by having non-native speakers read out true statements. People judged these trivia statements as less true when spoken by non-native speakers than native speakers. When people were told why they found it difficult to believe them they could adjust mild accents but not people with heavy accents.

The other article spoke of data collected using a questionnaire adapted from Jenkins (2007). The respondents were trainee English teachers in Malaysia. The findings show that people with NS accents (native speaker) were put into more positive categories than NNS accents (non-native speakers). The bias fell towards NS accents, they were seen as more correct and proper.

These articles show our innate bias towards native speaker accents. We prefer them if they speak the language like it is their mother tongue, why is this? It is equally good to speak English at a high level but with a noticeable non-disruptive accent as it is to speak English less well with a native accent. This phenomenon is so far unexplained but curious. English is becoming a lingua franca and therefore spoken by many groups of people with many different accents. This should be something to be proud of instead of forcing them to adopt native accents without having lived there and experiencing the culture associated with the accent.

 

Kaur, P. (2014). Accent Attitudes: Reactions to English as a Lingua Franca. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 134, 3-12.

Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093-1096.