Non-native speaker attitudes toward non-native English accents

The increasing number of proficient, non-native English speakers, both in U.S. academic institutions and around the globe, warrants considerable investigation into possible norms developing within non-native to non-native interactions. This report analyzes attitudes toward accent, a prominent indicator of foreignness, within non-native English speaker interactions. It presents relevant research on this topic, and it summarizes some of the major findings of an online survey that examined what attitudes, if any, non-native listeners may form on the basis of accent alone when listening to other non-native English speakers. The results suggest that listeners base attitude judgments more on native-likeness than on intelligibility. Also, speakers’ perceptions of their own non-native accent are more negative than how they actually rate themselves as compared to others.