Professor Brandon Baird doesn’t just hear Spanish accents—he studies how individuals perceive the people behind the accents.
Since biblical times, accents have been a way to label people—and not always for good. Accents can signify a person’s education level, hometown, and other aspects of their identity. However, associate professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies and Linguistics at Middlebury College Brandon Baird noted that “not all accents are created equally,” suggesting that some accents are less respected than others. In his colloquium address, “Hearing Race on a Single Word,” on February 27, 2025, Baird discussed how people with Spanish accents in the US often deal with negative stereotypes and prejudices because of their accents.
Connecting Accents to Perceptions
When Baird saw the discrimination Spanish accented people face in the US, he decided to research how their accent impacted listeners’ perceptions of them. To do so, he asked himself one powerful question: What happens if an English speaker pronounces just one word in a Spanish accent instead of an American accent?
To gather data, he asked participants in his study to listen to two recordings of the same sentence. In the first recording, a person spoke the sentence in an American accent, while in the second recording, another person repeated the same sentence, also with an American accent, except for one word, which was spoken in a Spanish accent. Baird then asked participants, “What do you think the speaker looks like?”
The responses to this question helped Baird understand how individuals are perceived based on their accents. He found that most participants described the person behind the full American accent as a tall, White male with glasses. On the other hand, they described the person behind the second sentence as a short, Hispanic male. Even though both speakers spoke English equally well, the speaker’s accent on that one word completely shifted listeners’ perception of them.
Connecting Accents to Actions
Making assumptions about a person’s appearance isn’t necessarily always inherently bad on its own. However, it can become problematic when those assumptions result in accented speakers being treated differently. Baird said that in some cases, prejudices based on accents “keep people from getting access to health care [and] getting places to live.” He referenced John Bond, a sociolinguist who completed a study that determined how someone’s accent affected their ability to rent an apartment. Bond found that people were less likely to get an apartment to rent if their accent wasn’t American.
However, it isn’t so much the accent that creates problems for accented speakers, but the people who have certain prejudices against those accents. Baird noted, “The attitudes that we have towards language, dialect, or an accent . . . they are an extension of our attitudes towards the people that speak those varieties.”
As Baird researched this phenomenon, he found numerous examples of Hispanic Americans receiving threats or angry comments because of their accents, including Colombian American newscaster Vanessa Ruiz. Ruiz gave a presentation at Middlebury College years ago, describing how (when on air) she usually speaks with her American accent, but she occasionally pronounces Spanish words with a Spanish accent. She received this comment from a viewer: “Deport her. She isn't American. She has no right to be here, no matter how much some corporation paid for her.” Baird remarked that discriminatory reactions to accents like Ruiz’s “are [real] things that affect people’s lives out there.”
Baird hopes his research will help eradicate discrimination based on accents from our society. He reiterated that while research is fun and interesting to talk about, “it’s important to remember always the humans behind our data.”
Find the Humanities Colloquium Schedule here.