These are two quite astonishing conclusions recently reached by neuroscientists. One: adults prefer people who speak with the same accent as them. Two: this criterion plays a more important role than skin color! This is demonstrated in particular by the neuropsychologist and linguist Albert Costa, in a book I have already spoken about here, The Bilingual Brain (Editions Odile Jacob), based on several studies carried out around the world (1).
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This explains. For a long time, the scientist recalls, Homo sapiens hardly had the opportunity to meet a human with a skin color other than his. The way of speaking therefore played an essential role in enabling him to know how to behave vis-à-vis his interlocutors. And… we still operate the same way. In fact, we can obtain a lot of information about a person during a simple conversation, whether it is his region of origin, his cultural level, his social category, etc. And this is also true from an early age, as shown by this series of astonishing experiences.
Via videos, we asked 5-year-old English-speaking children to say who they would like to have as friends. On the first film, a toddler speaks English; on the second, another speaks Russian. Result ? Advantage to those who use English, which seems logical since young English speakers understand it perfectly.
The experiment was then repeated with another criterion. This time, it’s the skin color that varies. Rebelote: unsurprisingly, children give a large preference to those with whom they can identify.
Third variable: accent. Here again, native English-speaking children prefer to have as friends children who speak with the same accent as them rather than those who use perfectly understandable English, but with Russian intonations.
The most surprising is yet to come. Between a child of different skin color having the same accent and a child of the same skin color speaking their language with a different accent, they are the first that a majority of children prefer to have as friends!
All of this may remind you of a (relatively) famous episode from the Bible: the shibboleth. In The Book of Judges(12, 4-6) the people of the Gileadites resort to this Hebrew term (which means “ear” or “branch”) to locate their Ephraimite enemies who are trying to escape them. Here is the excerpt “When a fugitive from Ephraim said, ‘Let me pass,’ the people of Gilead would ask him, ‘Are you from Ephraim?’ so Shibboleth!’ He pronounced Sibboleth, not being able to articulate it correctly, whereupon they seized him and killed him near the fords of the Jordan. On this occasion forty-two thousand men of Ephraim perished. And that is why, in linguistics, a “shibboleth” means a phrase or a word that reveals a person’s membership in a group.
Jews and Christians should not be the only ones to know this notion because, in reality, we are all concerned by the existence of these signs of verbal recognition. Imagine for example that, during an international conference, a Frenchman speaks English with a French accent. Well, neuroscience has proven it: listeners will remember his words less well and will judge them less credible than an identical message delivered by a native English speaker! “If one asks to judge the veracity of the following statement: “Ants do not sleep”, the answer depends on the accent with which it is pronounced. We judge the statement more plausible with an accent similar to ours only with a foreign accent”, writes Albert Costa, who concludes: “These results, among others, show to what extent language is a powerful factor of social discrimination.” They therefore concretely confer a considerable advantage on Anglo-Saxon speakers which, unless they cultivate a certain penchant for masochism, should dissuade French organizers from choosing English as the language of intervention during demonstrations organized in our country.
These preconceptions also explain – without justifying them – the contempt to which people in France are subjected who speak with regional intonations. In collective performances, in fact, the standard accent continues to evoke competence and seriousness, while Berry or Vosges sounds are associated with lack of culture and rurality. And don’t think that the working classes are the only ones affected by this phenomenon. The philosopher Michel Serres, from Agen, explained to L’Express: “I waited 60 years to be taken seriously. Before, I made people laugh.”
This is also what Clément Viktorovitch explains in his best-selling book, The power of rhetoric “Our brain works in an intuitive mode, he writes. Rather than engaging in costly reasoning, it takes shortcuts, which simplify thinking.” However, the accent is one of the most powerful of these shortcuts, according to the following “demonstration”: “You can’t say serious things with a regional accent.”
The public authorities – and this is very good – are now trying to fight against the stereotypes suffered by black people in France. When will there be a major campaign against stereotypes linked to regional accents?
(1) See also the experiment conducted at the University of California by David Pietraszewski.
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