Stigma and Discrimination Based on Non-Native Accent

This article aims to contribute to the scant sociological literature on discrimination based on non-native/L2 accent. It depends on semi-structured interviews with 40 Turkish highly-skilled migrants who left Turkey as adults with at least undergraduate degrees to have further degrees or professional careers in the US, and returned back to Turkey after living in the US for at least five years. In this paper, I focus on their experiences as non-native speakers of English during their stay in the US. I discuss that although they had left Turkey with certified proficiency in English, their everyday life in the US was negatively shaped by the fact that they had non-native accents. Although the respondents did not name their difficulties related to accent as discrimination, depending on their accounts, I argue that their non-native accent functioned as a basis of stigma, marking them as foreigners, and became a basis for negative differential treatment in different spheres of life in the US. I demonstrate in what ways non-native accent can become a basis for discrimination in the context of the US, and also discuss why those migrants who experience discriminatory treatment do not call it discrimination.