Regional Accent Discrimination in Hiring Decisions: A Language Attitude Study Page: 82
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the Northern and Southern speakers were divided, and each group of respondents was
examined to see if Northerners recognized Northerners and Southerners recognized
Southerners more frequently than their counterparts, there was not any real difference. In
fact, both groups scored exactly 44% on recognizing Southern speakers. Naturally, it was
tempting to assume that these results were an indication that Northerners and Southerners
not only think alike when judging accents, but also have equal skills in recognizing even
the subtle differences between southern accents. That may well be the case, but these
data cannot be the basis of any such assumption. The apparent similarities are easily
explained when we consider that most of these "northerners" are currently living in the
southwestern US, as is evidenced by the very fact that they participated in this project.
The data collectors did travel to South Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, in order to provide
as much geographic variety as possible for the study, and a few of the respondents were
national recruiters who were travelling through Texas on business, but most live not only
in Texas, but within a 50-mile radius of the Dallas/Forth Worth metroplex. Again, these
numbers have no real meaning, because of the small samples, the difference in the sizes
of the subgroups within the samples, and because of the geographic bias, but at least they
provided some interesting fodder for future investigations, as did this next subgroup of
respondents.
Twenty-three of the respondents grew up in Texas. Their responses were
separated for this investigation from those of all of the other 33 respondents. They were
then sorted for whether or not they claimed to have a Texas accent. Two questions
determined this. First, they were asked to identify the region on the map where people82
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Markley, E. Dianne. Regional Accent Discrimination in Hiring Decisions: A Language Attitude Study, thesis, August 2000; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2623/m1/89/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .