'Some Accents Sound Guiltier Than Others'

'Some Accents Sound Guiltier Than Others'

Photo: Andrey Kuzmin/AlamyIt probably comes as no great shock to be told that biases against certain regional accents in the UK are fairly entrenched in a familiar hierarchy, with Received Pronunciation (RP) at the top and varieties such as Scouse and Brummie towards the bottom. And in terms of status, that is generally what the research shows, across about fifty years of accent studies from the late 1960s into the 2020s. It just seems to be som…