The effect of speaker L2 English accent on hiring decisions in China
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/TheLinguisticProceedings/2025/16/01/008/000668Keywords:
accents, employment, linguistic discrimination, language attitudesAbstract
The present paper investigates the perceived employability of L2 speakers of English in China. In a perception experiment, 90 Mandarin-speaking participants based in China assessed the employability of speakers represented through audio stimuli using five-point Likert scales. The study included two male and two female speakers for each of three L2 English accent groups: German, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese. The results showed that speakers with a German accent received higher employability ratings than speakers with a Korean accent. However, speakers with a Mandarin accent were not rated significantly differently from the other L2 accent groups, supporting the prejudice explanation rather than the comprehensibility explanation.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
