'Yorkshire named top twang as Brummie brogue comes bottom'

This article, published by the Guardian and written by David Batty, sheds light on the quandary imposed on individual’s accents in correlation to their intellectual ability.  This article particularly highlights the controversy through a study conducted that conveyed the stereotypes inflicted towards those with Brummie accents. The testing unleashed three UK accents to 48 participants and asked them to rate their intelligence on a mark scheme from 1-10. The conclusion deduced portrayed that the Yorkshire accent sounded most scintillating, as oppose to the Birmingham accent that was degraded and marked as less intelligent than individuals that didn’t speak at all. Regional stereotypes were imposed on Brummies as “...a lot of people associate Birmingham with criminal activity, and they associate criminal activity with low intelligence.” This assumption of criminal activity is a stereotype in which dispersed.

This concept has a direct correspondence to the stereotypes discussed previously in Amy Tan’s story. Tan’s mother was perceived as less witty, due to the fact that she spoke “broken English,” and was incompetent of speaking it with a high degree of accuracy. However this by no means should be a denotation of one’s intelligence or self-worth.