{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Devyani Sharma on Accents","description":" What does your accent \u2013 and yes, every speaker has one \u2013 say about you? Or perhaps the better question is, what do others hear in your accent? These are the sorts of questions that Devyani Sharma, a professor of language and communication at Oxford\u2019s Worcester College, asks every day, especially about the many English speakers around the world. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sharma takes a deep dive into the accents of Britain, where accents have famously been used as markers of social status for years. As she tells interviewer David Edmonds, \u201cthe UK stands out as a country that's organized its whole social system around accent for a very long time.\u201d While that\u2019s been true historically, Sharma\u2019s own research and public service \u2013 through projects like Generations of London English, Dialect Development and Style in a Diasporic Community, and the Accent Bias Britain online resource \u2013 has helped reduce the negatives around that. As she details for Edmonds, \u201cInterestingly, just a reminder that \u2018you might be relying on accent as a shortcut and please don't\u2019 was enough to change recruiters\u2019 behavior. It doesn't always happen with gender and race anymore, and my sense is that's because the message has been saturated. People are annoyed to be reminded before doing a recruiting task, but they haven't thought as much about how much they use accent when judging people.\u201d   ","author_name":"Social Science Bites","author_url":"http:\/\/www.socialsciencebites.com","html":"