Focus on what people say, not how they say it

Two of the organisers, Dr Christian Ilbury from the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, and President of the 93% Club, Grace Mai Clark, have also been rolling out training to staff across the University to tackle accent bias on campus.

Christian and Grace talk to Edinburgh Impact about accent bias and how they are working with staff and students to address this at the University.

What is accent bias?

Christian: If we break down the component parts, accent refers to speech sounds – the way that somebody speaks and the specific sounds you hear. Everybody has an accent and it cues to things such as your social background, where you grew up, your sexuality and so on.

Bias is essentially a simplified way of thinking about the world, and it is a natural human cognitive mechanism.

Accent bias refers to people having preferences for particular accents or discriminating against accents on the basis of non-accurate associations. While we can infer some things about an individual on the basis of their accent, like where they grew up, we can’t infer anything about their intellect or their competence.

Why are people bias against certain accents?

Christian: The ways of speaking in the UK and around the world are linked to difference and people are used to pointing out that difference. It can be useful because it marks where you’re from or the people that you associate with, but it can also become a point of contention.

People can use it to say you’re not one of us or you can’t be intelligent because you’re speaking in a way that I think is ‘non-standard’ or the world thinks is ‘non-standard’.

Grace: Accent marks you as part of a group and your accent is formed by the people that you are around, and the chances are, you are also going to be around people who are from a similar socioeconomic status to you.

In the UK, we have levels of prejudice around what backgrounds people come from and how much money people come from. The way you say something can be a marker of this idea of “oh, you’re not speaking properly” just because you have like an accent, or a thick regional accent.

Where are you most likely to see accent bias?

Christian: It’s an issue in society – it’s not specific to the University of Edinburgh or higher education and it’s unfortunately going to be the case elsewhere too.

University is quite a unique situation where you might have more accent diversity than in other societal domains. Students often move from areas where everyone sounds like them, then they get to university and people sound different to them. Sometimes that difference is valued and sometimes that difference is not.

There are other sectors who will probably never have this conversation, whereas universities are open to criticality and open to engaging with students and working towards creating a educational community that’s welcoming to difference.

What role do universities, such as Edinburgh, have in changing perceptions?

Grace: Going to University is such a pivotal point in your life, particularly if you come from a working-class background. I am in a very small minority of 30 or 40 students in a year group of 120 that have gone onto university, and only two of us went to university outside of the North of England.

There can be a real imbalance between the type of soft skills and development opportunities that state school students get compared to privately educated students. Universities can play a role in making sure people have more opportunities presented to them so they know they can get into universities like Edinburgh and do academically challenging degrees.

This could be through outreach to schools, but also making sure Widening Participation students are supported throughout their time at university. It’s not just about monitoring your Widening Participation admissions rate, but also about supporting students all the way up to graduation and giving them the skills they need for the future.

It’s also being clear that university is a diverse place and there’s people from all sorts of backgrounds, so you are going to encounter lots of different people. It’s getting across that everyone who is here deserves, and is entitled, to be here.

What do you cover in your accent bias training workshop?

Christian: The training provides an introduction to accent bias from the perspective of sociolinguistics – the field that I work in. It includes some background on studies about the perception of different accents and also describes a well-established ‘hierarchy of accents’ in the UK.

Then we introduce some student testimonies that Grace’s society have recorded and that Shanley’s society (the Scottish Social Mobility Society) have recorded. From there we introduce some possible interventions and some teaching strategies that could be adopted.

This is linked to recommendations made in a Sutton Trust report that I co-authored, where we argue that a particularly effective intervention in tackling this issue is raising awareness of the issue. If people can recognise it, they can acknowledge that it is a problem and can take steps to mitigate their bias.

We’re giving people both the tools to be able to describe what’s going on, strategies on how to tackle it when they see it, and also to legitimise the experiences that people have of accent bias and linguistic discrimination.

How did the accent bias training come about?

Grace: I took over as president of the 93% Club in 2023 and the guy who was president before me was a linguistics student and had taken Christian’s course. They’d always said it would be great to do something about the diversity of language and linguistics.

I also met with the head of the WP department when I took over and it was just after we’d finished the State School Proud campaign and we’d gotten quite a bit of media traction from it. What had particularly stood out were the negative experiences that students had had with staff, when people had always thought it was mainly a peer-on-peer issue.  

We want to make sure students have a better experience, so we thought it would be good to train staff on this issue. I then met with Christine and we planned the first ‘Speaking Out’ event that took place in November 2023 and got lots of interest.

Who is the workshop for?

Grace: We’ve targeted it to staff so they can get a more up to date view on students, their experiences, the issues affecting them, and reconsider their views.

We also targeted staff because they will be at the university for much longer than students. By targeting staff we are also targeting the University as an institution to tackle this at a systemic level. 

How many people have you trained so far?

Grace: We’ve delivered it to over 500 members of staff and I think we’re just about close to getting most departments.

We’ve also been to Queen Margaret University to deliver a workshop there.

How do you blend your academic work into this training?

Christian: I study how people use language and I think if we are really committed to that agenda, then we really need to respond to what’s going on wherever we work, and whoever we engage with.

I don’t think sociolinguists in the UK have really thought about universities as a potential area of linguistic discrimination. People have done work in law, medicine and health settings, but there is comparatively less research on linguistic discrimination in universities. For me, the main thing that I’m doing is working to bring my research into practice.

How can people take part in the accent bias workshop?

Christian: Right now, we’ve gone into meetings and we’ve run it for either 10 minutes or for longer hour-and-a-half sessions. That’s been through referrals or people have approached us to ask if we can offer it to their department.

In the longer term, we are developing a website that will then be standalone for people to access resources whenever they need them.

What are you hoping to achieve in the long term?

Christian: The main thing is we want people to recognise the issue and not let these kinds of beliefs go unchecked.

Grace: It’s about being aware of these issues and not letting them impact the way you teach. When we have students telling us about negative experiences or feeling singled out, this is one way we can remind them that there is a place for them at this University and that they absolutely deserve to be here.

There is a community around them of people who have probably been through the same thing and have similar experiences. We want to empower people to embrace this part of their identity, and also lean on us and the 93% club for support. No one needs to push through this alone by any means.

What feedback have you received from staff?

Christian: We’ve had quite a lot of people tell us it’s something they’d never thought of or hadn’t seen it as an issue before. I also had someone let us know that, after attending the training, they received an apology from their manager for mocking their accent.

We have also had a lot of staff thank us for legitimising their own experiences and struggling to feel empowered in their own voice.

Grace: It’s been really nice to hear people say they now feel more comfortable talking about their experience with their peers. Its helped start conversations and people know they can get involved – it might be that somebody brings it up in a meeting or it could lead to someone joining an EDI committee.

What advice would you give to someone looking to challenge their own biases or looking for support?

Grace: We want people to be aware of the issues and the impact it can have in making students feel singled out. I’d encourage working class people to join communities such as the 93% Club and find a group of people who can support them. We don’t want this topic to be a taboo and to do that we need everyone to be having honest discussions about this as a topic.

Christian: I’d say, does it really matter if somebody says ‘thing’, ‘ting’ or ‘hing’? At the end of the day, they’re all the same “thing”.

You should focus on what people say, not how they say it.

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