The Erasmus+ CIRCE project online seminar “ccentism as a Form of Linguistic Racism: Unpacking Power, Prejudice, and Emotionality” will be held on 7 July 2025 at 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (CEST). Speaker: Sender Dovchin, Curtin University, Australia.
The free seminar, organised by the CIRCE project in collaboration with DFCLAM University of Siena, H2IOSC project and Cnr-Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, will be included in the H2IOSC Training Environment to enable all interested parties to access the event registration.
Speaker Bio
Professor Sender Dovchin is currently a Senior Principal Research Fellow at the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia. She is also an Australian Research Council Fellow and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellow. Previously, she worked at the University of Aizu, Japan and National University of Mongolia. Professor Dovchin was also an Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics – national top journal. Professor Dovchin is a world-leading applied linguist who has been twice recognised by The Australian Research Magazine – in 2021 and 2024 – as the top linguist in the nation and among the top 250 researchers across all fields in Australia. She is also ranked in the top 2% of the most cited scholars globally, according to the Stanford University citation database. As a proud Mongolian background woman, she actively incorporates Southern theories, including Indigenous perspectives, into her work. She has led multiple high-impact research projects, all focused on empowering children and young people from Indigenous, refugee, and migrant backgrounds in Australia and beyond. She has authored multiple research monographs and edited volumes with prestigious international publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and among others. In addition, she has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles –most as sole or lead author–in top-tier Q1 journals, widely regarded as benchmarks of scholarly excellence in the discipline.
Summary
Accentism is one of the key features of linguistic racism. It is a form of linguistic discrimination against individuals not only based on their accents but also on their race. Accentism functions as a potent social marker that invokes judgements about a speaker’s race, intelligence, credibility and belonging. Accentism should always be understood at the intersectionality of racism because one’s accent is never judged by separation from the language users’ race.
In this presentation, I examine multilayered consequences of accentism, with the aim of advancing scholarly understanding of how accent-based discrimination functions as a pervasive form of linguistic racism. English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) people in Australia frequently report being misunderstood due to their accents. These experiences are not isolated or incidental – they are shaped by entrenched powerful ideologies about the standardized and dominant language system.
Prejudice caused by accentism against the racialized language users could pose serious emotional harms, leading to linguistic inferiority complexes such as social withdrawal, a sense of non-belonging, low self-esteem, fear, and anxiety. The accumulation of these inferiority complexes further instigates severe depressive symptoms of mental health, such as suicidal ideations, eating disorders, substance abuse and depression.
Accentism is a critical issue in social justice and calls for systemic interventions to disrupt accent-based discrimination. I conclude this presentation by discussing the pedagogical implications for language educators. I emphasize the importance of taking an integrated approach to address accentism and its emotional and psychological harms together in order to transform language education.