Ed.Re.M

Research by an HR consultancy shows that individuals with nonnative accents are regularly perceived as less competent, less intelligent, and less trustworthy in professional settings, privileging white populations and stifling marginalized communities from classrooms to courtrooms. This bias extends to African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Chicano English dialects, which actually have nuanced and accurate tense systems beyond Standard English’s three tenses. Double negatives, such as “ain’t got none,” and omitted copulas, like “he smart,” are often deemed “uneducated,” despite being natural grammatical structures found in languages worldwide.

Unfortunately, big economic and cultural obstacles stand in opposition to that belief.