Abstract
This review aims to examine the discrimination and prejudices toward the accent of non-native English speakers and cyberbullying as the ripple effect of these negative consequences. Following Arksey and O’Malley’s framework of conducting a scoping review, 60 studies from 2012 to 2021 were retrieved from the ERIC and Google Scholar databases. The studies were reviewed from two aspects: (1) psychological impact on speakers with a non-native English accent, (2) attitudes toward non-native English accents from the victim’s and perpetrator’s perspectives. The findings suggested that speaking with a non-native English accent drew negative cognitive, affective, and behavioral experiences. Biases toward non-native English accents were due to the general derogatory perception of an accent and the comprehensibility of speakers’ accent and pronunciation. “Accent acceptability” can be inculcated at all levels of education, not only through multicultural education but also through the concerted effort of policy makers and practitioners to seriously address this social issue. Accent awareness can dispel unwarranted and undesirable judgements of non-native English accent speakers. Future studies should be conducted on the effects of social and mental health experiences, particularly of non-native ESL and EFL teachers, given that this may be the only profession required to teach “live” during the pandemic and thus be subjected to public praise or ridicule.
Highlights
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60 articles were examined to investigate the impacts of speaking with a nonnative English accent, which were categorized into three aspects: (i) affective impact [16,17,18,19,20]; (ii) behavioral impact [21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42]; and (iii) cognitive impact [43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75]
The studies were predominantly from countries in Asia and Europe where English is spoken as a second or foreign language. These studies were from Asian countries, i.e., Malaysia, Taiwan, Pakistan, Vietnam, China, Japan, India, Philippines, Iran, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Hong Kong
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. One of the most popular ideas in the linguistic field is that accent is part of a culture, which reflects a person’s identity. The term accent has several meanings, but in speech it is an identifiable style of pronunciation that varies geographically or socioeconomically [1] and is one of the most noticeable features of speech [2]. Regional accents are influenced by geographical location, whereas social accents reflect speakers’ educational, socioeconomic, and ethnic backgrounds [2,3] as well as the phonetic variances caused by first language (L1) effect on the second language (L2) [2]
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