Working-class accent seen as sign of being ‘less intelligent’

WORKING-CLASS people are judged 14 per cent less intelligent simply because of their accent, a study has found.

They are also rated four per cent less friendly and five per cent less trustworthy, according to research which asked participants to rate people based on how they spoke.

People from Essex were judged on average 11 per cent less intelligent than those from south-west London.

Women were evaluated as being two per cent less intelligent than men but five per cent more friendly and trustworthy than men.

The research by Dr Amanda Cole, an Essex University academic and postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Analytics and Data Science, tested the link between the way we speak and perceptions of class on 200 people.

The participants, aged between 18 and 33, were played 10-second audio clips of young people reading the same sentence.

Dr Cole said the accent bias was “deeply unfair”, and propped up “class prejudice, racial inequality, gender stereotypes and clichéd ideas of people from certain areas”.

The clips were of more than 100 people from across London and the South East without being told anything about their background.

“In Britain, many people still subscribe to the mindset that a few limited ways of speaking English [such as the “Queen’s English”, which is at the extreme] are legitimate and correct while others aren’t,” Dr Cole said.