Most of us are taught, from a young age, not to make assumptions about others based on their appearance.

Or we learn, through experience, that the visible characteristics of a person—their age, ethnicity, body size and shape, or gender identity—are poor predictors of their intellect, status, level of education, or sophistication.

In short, we figure out that judging a book by its cover is problematic at best, and prejudiced and discriminatory at worst.

And yet, many people seem perfectly comfortable with making attributions based on people’s speech, and specifically their regional or nonnative accents. Someone who would never mock a person based on their weight, for example, might feel no compunction about imitating a Southerner’s drawl, or the vocal fry (creaky voice) associated with the speech of younger women.

The study of speech patterns like these, and the attributions they engender, is the province of researchers who call themselves sociophoneticists. This rather formidable term denotes linguists who study the social aspects of speech sounds. And the body of research they have amassed provides a fascinating—and at times, rather depressing—account of how language can function as a social cue, and one that can serve to unite or to divide us.

I’ve been thinking about accent bias and speech discrimination quite a bit........

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