Imagine that you are on trial for a crime you did not commit. Your lawyer has collected all of the evidence you need to be acquittedDeclared innocent of a crime or of wrongdoing.. You have spent weeks preparing your testimony. But in the end, the jury decides you are guilty - not because of the strength of your case, but because of the way your voice sounds.

Studies have shown that accents have a powerful effect on people's judgements of guilt or innocence in the courtroom. And not only there: experts think that accents can sway the quality of medical care you receive, the jobs you get hired for, and the places you are allowed to live.

In universities, too, students report being discriminated against for speaking differently. Guidance issued by Edinburgh University this week warned privileged students against "being snobs" towards their state-educated or less wealthy peers, as students admitted under its widening participation programme said that they had received cruel comments equating their regional accents to low intelligence.

Our unconscious prejudice towards certain accents runs deep even in popular culture. A sociolinguistRelating to the study of how language is used by different groups in society, or how language is affected by social factors. analysed the popular response to participants in the reality TV show Love Island and determined that speakers with standard southern accents were less likely to face accent discrimination by audiences than their peers from elsewhere.¹

There is no consensusGeneral agreement. It was originally a Latin word. on what causes linguistic discrimination. Linguists think that the brain perceives familiar accents with less cognitiveRelating to the processes of thinking and reasoning. effort than unfamiliar ones, which require an "effortful listening" process. This means that anyone with a non-standard accent is likely to be viewed with suspicion. In 2010, scientists identified that unknown statements are judged to be less credible when said with a foreign accent compared to a native one.²

The evidence is so stark that there are plenty of famous examples of people who swapped their regional accents for the standard received pronunciation (RP). Former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, dropped her Lincolnshire accent in a bid to sound posher.

In George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, and its later musical adaptation My Fair Lady, linguist and phoneticianAn expert or student of phonetics, how humans produce or perceive sound. Henry Higgins trains the working-class Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to "talk like a lady". An RP accent has long been treated as the mark of sophistication and class.

Though not everyone agrees. George Orwell wrote that the upper-class English accent is characterised by "a sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing... No wonder everyone hates us so."

The linguist Rosina Lippi-Green coined the term "standard language ideology" to describe just this phenomenon. According to Lippi-Green, people tend to assume that the dialect with the greatest level of social prestige is the "correct" form of a language. In reality, though, no dialect or accent is any more correct than the other.

Similarly, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that certain ways of speaking give people power and status. Linguistic discrimination can establish other forms of division, including classism, racism and xenophobiaLiterally 'fear of strangers' (in Greek), but the word is often used to refer to hatred or mistrust of foreigners as well as fear..

Can we defeat linguistic discrimination?

Yes: Linguistic discrimination, like every other form of discrimination, is slowly declining. Luckily, we are finally managing to rid ourselves of the primacy of RP, which only deepens regional inequalities and perpetuates existing wealth structures.

No: Linguistic bias is all subconscious, and we are conditioned to feel it from birth. We are taught this prejudice in the media, on TV, in school and elsewhere. It will be almost impossible to rid ourselves of it.

Or... Studies suggest that feeling suspicious of unfamiliar accents is just the way that the brain is programmed. It is a natural human instinct to have a negative bias towards somebody who we cannot understand as easily.