The effect of non-native accentedness on hiring success.

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Issue Date
2021-07-13
Language
en
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In a world where globalisation and multilingualism have become increasingly important, companies are more likely to employ people of different nationalities. This difference in nationality will most likely lead to people speaking different languages at the workplace. To understand each other, many companies introduced English as the main language at the workplace. However, many employees whose mother tongue is not English speak English with a non-native accent, which may lead to prejudice and bias. Therefore, it is difficult to ignore the influence of non-native accents at the workplace. According to previous research, the effects of having a non-native accent at the workplace can be of great importance for the development of careers. Due to bias and prejudice associated with accents, employees are often mistreated based on their accent. Therefore, the present study focuses on the effect a non-native accent can have on the hiring recommendations, and the effect of a prejudice control intervention on non-native accent discrimination. 122 participants were asked to rate the two speakers (either British-English or French-accented English) in terms of hirability, similarity, comprehensibility, accentedness, status, solidarity, and dynamism. Based on the results, it could be concluded that there was no significant effect of a non-native accent on hirability. This suggests that the participants, which all had experience with hiring employees, did not seem to judge speakers based on their accents. Furthermore, the inclusion of a prejudice-control (either the French-accented version with or without a prejudice control text) did not have a significant effect on the hiring recommendation of the non-native accented speaker. However, a significant correlation was found between hiring recommendation and similarity, status, solidarity, and dynamism respectively.
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