ACCENT DISCRIMINATION

Accent Discrimination

Accent Discrimination

Introduction

Discrimination in the workplace is not only wrong and unfair; it can cost one's company millions of dollars in litigation. Whether one is just starting a business or tightening existing policy, having a hard-line stance against discrimination is essential. While there are many forms of discrimination, some more subtle than others, they should all be considered wrong and punished accordingly. Fortunately, there are moderately easy ways to ensure that a business will treat each and every employee fairly. This discrimination free atmosphere benefits a business or a company in the long run.

Discussion

A company must establish clear policies against discrimination in writing. The rules and subsequent punishments for breaking them should be well-defined. It must cover every possible scenario. If needed, consultancy should be obtained with outside legal help in order to draft a proper and all-encompassing policy.

A major problem that occurs within a company is the language or accent discrimination. Language orientation refers to the preferred language of a business. It also refers to an employee's preferred language. Known as the person's primary language or mother tongue, it is the language learned from birth and with which the person is most comfortable. Employee language orientation is often an indicator of national origin or race and any actions taken by an employer based on a worker's language orientation is a form of discrimination and illegal.

Discrimination refers to specific behaviors or actions directed at a group or its individual members based solely on the group membership. In accent discrimination, one's way of speaking is used as a basis for arbitrary evaluations and judgments (Kim, Wang, Deng, Alvarez & Li, 2011). Unlike other forms of discrimination, there are no strong norms against accent discrimination in the general society. Accent serves as the first point of gate keeping because we are forbidden, by law and social custom, and perhaps by a prevailing sense of what is morally and ethically right, from using race, ethnicity, homeland or economics more directly. We have no such compunctions about language, however. Thus, accent becomes a litmus test for exclusion, and excuse to turn away, to recognize the other.

Speakers with accents often experience discrimination in housing and employment. For example, landlords are less likely to call back speakers who have foreign or ethnic accents and are more likely to be assigned by employers to lower status positions than are those with standard accents. In business settings, individuals with non-standard accents are more likely to evaluate negatively. Accent discrimination is also present in educational institutions. For example, non-native speaking graduate students, lecturers, and professors, across college campuses in the US have been target for being unintelligible because of accent (Goldberg, 2011). On average, however, students taught by non-native English speaker do not underperform when compared to those taught by native speakers of English. Studies have shown the perception of the accent, not the accent by itself, often results in negative evaluations of speakers.

In the United States, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination ...