外刊阅读20240528｜伦敦腔就是高贵的象征？

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Everyone has an accent, and each one is a beacon to the rest of the world, prompting all sorts of assumptions about the speaker’s age, geographic origins, race, socioeconomic status, even their education and intellect. The associations between voice and identity are so strong that, around the world, cultures have ordered regional accents into a hierarchy of prestige.

Researchers such as Alarna Samarasinghe, a linguist at the University of Bristol, in England, have found that people in the U.K. tend to hold people with a southeastern English accent (also called received pronunciation) in higher regard than those who sound like they come from rural parts of the country. In the U.S., accents from the South are commonly described as “nicer” but less brainy. These sorts of biases can affect a speaker’s personal or professional success. For instance, John Baugh, a linguist at Washington University in St. Louis, has found that voices that sound African American or Mexican American—even when they're not attached to faces—tend to be denied more job and housing opportunities than those perceived as white.

So it’s no shock that people often try to alter their accents, especially as they move between geographies or social contexts. Ignacio Moreno-Torres, a linguist at the University of Málaga, in Spain, recalls rapidly discarding his Málaga accent when he moved to Madrid for college, where his peers immediately ribbed him for his odd speech. Many speakers of African American Vernacular English are all too familiar with the exhausting process of toggling between different ways of speaking in different social contexts, Sonja Lanehart, a linguist at the University of Arizona, told me.

Accents, of course, don’t always bend to expectation or hierarchy. English that’s strongly Indian-accented can, for some people, be more challenging to understand, Okim Kang, a linguist at Northern Arizona University, told me. But she once interviewed a lawyer who was dead set on maintaining that accent because it helped her connect with her clients, who spoke in a similar way. Another person she worked with lost her high-status British accent within months of starting to date an American.  “If I want to be socially closer to you, then I’m more likely to imitate what you’re doing,” Cynthia Clopper, a linguist at Ohio State University, told me. “But I can also move further away.”