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Funny how we associate particular accents with particular kinds of intelligence. It’s a hidden aspect of stereotyping. One reason Knives Out was an interesting movie was that Daniel Craig had that thick, weird southern accent but played basically a straight-up classic detective
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For that accent, you expect some sort of provincial homey-wisdom intelligence. With a British (Holmes) or French/Belgian (Poirot) accent you expect classic detective intelligence.
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India is the place you're looking for to see how accents are stereotyped. Forget intelligence, class, status, power are all determined by one's English accent.
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The size of this perceptional effect has been pretty staggering to observe as someone with the ability to switch between American East Coast, Bombay, and English-inflected colonial accents -- American makes me seem smoother & more confident, English smarter & more authoritative.
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Despite being a "Southern" accent (at least to the ears of non-Southerners), Craig's accent in Knives Out was still an upper-class variety. It's a gentlemanly drawl, not a redneck's incoherent slurring. So I'd say it still plays to the stereotype.
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Are you familiar with sociolinguistic prestige? It’s the framework that linguists use to analyse this, the perception of different dialects & registers. You’re referring to *overt* low prestige, where a speaker is stereotyped as unintelligent, backward, rural, working-class, &c.
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This generally checks out. I'm from the South, and don't have that much of an accent, but I've noticed that some of my friends with thicker accents get viewed and treated in certain ways.
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Whenever I notice incentives around particular usages of language, either explicit (eg censorship, “appropriateness police” etc) or implicit (favoring one form of usage including accents over another), warning bells go off in my brain. It’s another system of control.