Prejudice about regional accents is still prevalent in Britain

Prejudice about regional accents is still prevalent in Britain, and can lead to discrimination, according to leading UCL neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. Speaking in advance of delivering the 2017 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, speech expert Professor Scott (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) said: "We sound the way we do for a whole range of reasons - cultural, emotional, social - and we tend to judge other people's accents on the same basis. I passionately love Lancashire accents, for example, because it sounds like home to me. "But when our judgements about people's attractiveness or intelligence or capability are based on their accent, then this cultural baggage we all have has the potential to become discriminatory. The words people are using are a far better test of ability or competence than the way they are saying them." "This is a really fascinating subject and we'll be looking at what defines our accents - why we sound the way we do - during the Christmas Lectures later this month. The simple fact is we are always trying to understand people based on the way they sound and this can lead us all to make snap judgements." A wealth of polls in recent years have attempted to pinpoint the UK's sexiest or most intelligent sounding accents. A late 2015 poll by British Airways concluded that a Glaswegian accent is the sexiest, while the Geordie accent is the most intelligent.