British Council Seminar – Accent and Identity: Prejudice and Insecurity

On Tuesday 10th June I gave a British Council seminar  ‘Accent and Identity: Prejudice and Insecurity’ which you can see  here – I start speaking at 13:25 into the video. The presentation was and is an exploration of issues that are covered in more detail in Part 3 of  my book ‘Phonology for Listening’. I assert that we all have prejudices both for and against accents that we need to control.

There is an accompanying blog here.

There are a couple of sites which are of interest that I did not manage to get into my talk. The first is John Murphy’s list of ten speakers who might act as pronunciation models here. The second site of additional interest has a piece by a  journalist from the Independent newspaper who also discusses the prejudices that bounce into his head around race – ‘I am not a racist but sometimes I think like one’ by Richard Ferrer.

In the blog in particular, I confess to having prejudices – almost always ‘in-thought-only’, and almost always censored into silence by my reasoning processes. I am told that such thoughts are always likely to bounce into my head, needing control, until I become the Buddha.

There is also a recent article on prejudice ‘Lord Rant’ just here.

And Geoff Lindsay’s blog here illustrates the attractiveness of the RP accent as the ‘accent of evil’ in Hollywood movies.