What is accent bias?

- Speech has been used to segregate people for thousands of years. In the Old Testament, the tribe of Gilead defeated the Ephraimites and the Ephraimites, beaten, tried to escape. The tribe of Gilead used an accent test to identify survivors trying to flee. Anyone who claimed to be a survivor was asked to say the Hebrew word shibboleth meaning stream. But the Ephraimites didn't have the sh sound in their pronunciation lexicon. And so, anyone pronouncing the word shibboleth without the sh sound was immediately put to death. Now, it's not as extreme these days, but there are issues around someone's livelihood related to the way that they speak. Bias against others based on race, caste, skin color, education, gender, sexuality and more has been with us since the beginning. Human beings are remarkably adept at identifying native speech from non-native speech, and many research studies verify this finding. In fact, in one…