Tackling Linguistic Prejudice through Public Dialogue: The Accentism Project and Accentricity Podcast

There is increasing emphasis on public engagement as a central and integral part of academic practice: but can public engagement actually influence public perception? Public engagement work is sometimes conceptualized as the provision of information in a publicly accessible format, but key public engagement organizations insist that it needs to be a two-way process. The authors of this chapter suggest that it is through this two-way process of public dialogue, rather than through the provision of information, that it may be possible for linguists to tackle linguistic prejudice. The authors provide case studies of two projects taking a step in this direction: the Accentism project and Accentricity podcast.