ABSTRACT
Employment decisions are made on the basis of a multitude of factors. Background information regarding education, occupational training, previous job experience, and all sorts of personal and social characteristics is available to the employing agent from a candidate's dossier. When a job interview takes place, the impressions formed about a candidate also enter the employment decisions. Personal impressions are likely to be influenced by the applicant's dress and behavior. That speech cues may also be involved has been suggested by research during the past 20 years. Such speech cues evoke attitudes that may positively or negatively color evaluations of a particular speaker. The language spoken or the accent within a language seems particularly important in influencing attributions of social status. This conclusion is based on a series of studies using the matched-guise technique first introduced by Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, and Fillenbaum (1960). These authors had subjects evaluate the personalities of a series of speakers who were in fact the guises of bilinguals speaking Canadian French and English. A strong bias against French Canadian guises appeared in the evaluations. Subsequent studies using the technique have shown that listeners use accent variations to attribute social status to speakers. The “social status” of accent has been extensively charted in England (cf. Giles & Powesland, 1975), Scotland (Cheyne, 1970), French Canada (d'Anglejan & Tucker, 1973), The United States (Labov, 1964; Ryan & Carranza, 1977), and Ireland (Edwards, 1977). If accent is widely used as a clue to the social status of speakers, it may well color evaluations of their occupational suitability. Two recent studies suggest that this may in fact be the case.
